Thanks for sharing your experiences granny. Just trying to picture the carnage at that cinema!
Perhaps the documentaries and books were sponsored by 'The Society of Trainspotters'?!
Though it's just one of those things that has stuck in my head ever since, about trainspotting and the stereotypes that wasn't necessarily completely correct. It probably had been regional thing to a certain extent. I'm fairly sure the main focus was on London and the suburbs and the greater rail network.
We are possibly talking about different age groups here as well? I had been referring to a much younger age group than the groups that would be able to go to meet the opposite sex at Dance Halls etc and get their kicks in other more grown up ways. My mum used to tell us stories about the heady days of her going to see Jack Parnell's Jazz band in London in the late 1940s-1950s and blown away watching him bash the devil out of his drum kit. Apart from that, all quite civilised I believe!
I had been talking about the much younger generation, who got their kicks from either playing around on bomb sites after the war or by watching locomotives thundering by, as close as they dared get to the railway line. The first Heavy Metal?!
I suppose there was a real excitement for them watching the likes of the Flying Scotsman roaring past at great speed, before they eventually discovered other recreational activities!
I was a child of the 60s and it was just Saturday morning pictures at the cinema for us of a certain age. My brother had the interest in model railways and made a spectacular layout in our shared bedroom in the late 60s - early 70s. He would go with a mate and watch trains at different stations. I think he started noting down types of trains and serial numbers etc but he eventually gave up on that and it was just a phase at a certain point in his young life. I don't think he was in anyway weird but doing what others were into, in his circle.
There are varying degrees in many things and trainspotting is probably no exception. You will have had the real obsessives who would hang around on platforms all day and noting every detail and then other types of trainspotters who got their kicks watching steam trains and their later Diesel counterparts thundering along. The youngsters who didn't have other ways to get that same excitement.
and Francis is happily agrees, it is (she whispers) Nostalgic. 
