Review of "Platform Souls - The Trainspotter as Twentieth-Century Hero" by Nicholas Whittaker. 255 pages. Published by Victor Gollancz. Price 14 pounds 99.

Why is it that the term "trainspotter" has  recently developed into an object of media scorn, a synonym for social inadequacy, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and fashion disaster? It's a concept that has travelled a long way from the 1940's when, as Nicholas Whittaker reminds us, the trainspotter was virtually invented by the publication of the first of Ian Allan's abc books. Then, legions of young lads in short trousers ( and their dads and, so the legend has it, numerous senior members of the Church of England's clergy)  at last had the chance to underline the engine numbers which they could observe over lineside fences and from station platforms up and down the land. 

In an age dominated by a bland uniformity of  TV culture and political conformity, Whittaker suggests that the disdain heaped upon the trainspotter is a result of suspicion of the eccentric loner, the outsider who pursues his hobby (it's undeniably a male-dominated scene) of collecting data about a form of transport which has the dual disadvantages of being comfortably collective and not sexily individualistic like the motor car, and which, moreover, attracts far less political interest in the form of investment compared with road transport.

But "Platform Souls" isn't a work of sociological analysis. It's an honest account of one man's odyssey from discovering the joys of number collecting and "bunking" engine sheds  as a schoolboy in Burton-on-Trent in 1964, through the twin agonies of the end of the steam era on British Railways and early disappointments in love, through a succession of boring clerical jobs - including one with the BR catering subsidiary Travellers' Fare in a seedy office near Kings Cross, a nightmare journey from Athens to England after spending two frustrating weeks in search of  the pleasures of the flesh with a long lost girlfriend, to the manufactured nostalgia of the eighties and nineties with aseptically preserved steam railways and Roast Beef Specials to Stratford-upon-Avon, and a time when even the monstrous diesels, the usurpers of steam, began to be objects of desire with the rapid demise of many of their number.

Dominating Nicholas Whittaker's narrative is the sense of the identity which an individual had as a member of the spotting fraternity. There were unwritten rules, for example. You never underlined the numbers of engines which you hadn't actually seen, a heinous crime known as "fudging". And it's the sense of belonging to a group of people who share common aims, even ideals, which seems to sustain the author and provide a fixed, ordered point of reference through the various vicissitudes of human experience which he relates.

In their book, 'The Railway Station, a Social History", Richards and Mackenzie suggest that

"the keeping of lists of trains seen (is) a desire to provide order and system in a disordered universe, to give life an encompassable finite purpose."

We are talking culture, even religion, here. Perhaps the need to "cop" the complete members of a locomotive class, or to travel over the whole extent of the rail network is an aspiration towards a state of grace, of perfection, which it is easier to attain in the ideal world of the spotter's spiral bound notebook and the Platform 5 Combined Volume that it ever is in the haphazard world of human relationships and the relentless work ethic.

Towards the end of his book Whittaker offers his own explanation:

"On all the evidence, trainspotting is one of the few pastimes that engages people in the general hum of society, that throws people together in a hurly-burly way to talk and have a laugh and soak up a bit of history."

"Platform Souls" succeeds in conveying all of this in a compelling and stylish narrative - perhaps marking a new era in writing by rail enthusiasts.