Tales of the track: New book recounts Scots pensioners’ journey round UK and the touching stories of people they met

A PAIR of Scottish pensioners have completed a 15,000-mile odyssey along every UK rail line.

Author Stuart Campbell and pal John Aitken clocked up 442 different journeys over 43 days, taking in bustling commuter routes as well as savouring some of the world’s most scenic journeys.

Along the way they chatted to hundreds of fellow passengers who shared their stories, providing a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary – and not-so-ordinary – travellers in 21st Century Britain.

Now retired lecturer and mental health worker Stuart, 68, has chronicled their touching, bizarre and enlightening encounters for a new book.

“I do like trains but calling myself a buff would be overstating it,” Glasgow-based Stuart told The Sunday Post.

“When I was 12 I was a train spotter, standing on platforms noting down the numbers of steam locos, but that was a long time ago.

“I’ve been looking for fresh things to do since I retired and writing has given me that.”

Dad-of-four Stuart, who moved from Edinburgh four years ago with wife Morag, has previously written a book based on his travels around Scotland with four mates after getting his bus pass.

His new one, called Daniel Defoe’s Railway Journey, is on a whole other, epic scale.

Robinson Crusoe writer Defoe wrote of 13 journeys around Britain in the early 18th Century. Stuart and former secondary school head teacher John, also 68, from Keith, let the train take the strain for their marathon.

“We did it in nine blocks of journeys, taking one part of the country and completing each in about five days,” said Stuart.

“We spent about £1000 on fares.”

The duo would frequently jump on and off around 15 trains daily, with one exceptional day on the commuter network around Glasgow and Lanarkshire involving 22 different changes.

Astonishingly, over the nine weeks they only had a couple of really late trains and one that failed to show up at all.

A massive part of the undertaking was to find out about their fellow travellers and around 300 passenger conversations are recounted in the book.

“I’m not actually very good at talking to strangers, which is a bit of a drawback considering what I set out to do,” smiled Stuart.

“John would have to prod me to go to speak to people.

“When I told them I was travelling on every rail line in the country, they were almost without exception lovely people. They’d start off by saying they didn’t know why I wanted to talk to them as they weren’t interesting people – and then proved they were.”

Many of the meetings are still fabulously fresh in Stuart’s mind. One was with a 92-year-old former sailor in Cornwall.

“He was a bit deaf so he spoke really loudly and the entire carriage listened to him recalling his Second World War days.

“He spoke about kamikaze pilots coming in and ships sinking around him.

“On leave in Portsmouth, he was caught up in a bombing raid. He gave shelter to two young women and his eyes lit up as he thought back to his youth.

“A couple of days a week he’d take this journey, sitting in his favourite seat, staring out at the sea.”

The ex-Navy man was far from the only one to open up.

“I had one journey on the Central Wales line with a woman and her dog called Robin which was dying of cancer,” said Stuart. “She’d taken Robin on one last holiday together to the Gower Peninsula. It was a really poignant moment for her.

“She was going through a tough time as she confided that her husband had just left her after 35 years, saying he’d only take her back if she would stop suffering from depression. It really would have broken your heart.”

A pest controller’s description of being bitten by a rat as he tried to extricate it from between a curtain and its lining and a man who found his health concerns easing since taking up poetry were among other meetings which sprung to mind.

“Strangely I met that chap twice, on trains hundreds of miles apart. He was the loveliest man and he said quite simply, ‘I have a house, I have friends, I have enough.’ That was so powerful. One lady in Scotland told how she’d lost her confidence after her husband died so set off on a trip from John O’Groats to Land’s End to push herself.

“I was endlessly struck by the goodness and niceness and vulnerability of people I met.”

The duo’s nightly accommodation was often of the cheap and cheerful variety.

“We had one in Scarborough which cost £16 a night, including breakfast. We thought that was a good deal until we looked out of the window the next morning and saw the one opposite was £14 and that included a free pint of beer.

“Mind you, ours did have a parrot that spouted UKIP slogans.”

The railway epic was completed last autumn, avoiding the winter days when it would have been too dark to see the places they visited.

And now, many months later and with the book about to be launched, Stuart said the lure of the rails was becoming stronger once more.

“There was one day when I was scunnered with the whole thing,” he added. “And I never wanted to see the dark and hellish platforms of Birmingham’s New Street station again.

“But overall it was such good fun. It was a ridiculous thing to do at my age, but I wish we were setting off again.”

Daniel Defoe’s Railway Journey by Stuart Campbell (Sandstone Press) £8.99 paperback is out on July 20.