Crewe isn’t just a town—it’s a railway institution, a place where the tracks don’t just run through the landscape but through people’s veins. If you grow up here, you don’t just hear trains; you live them. The low hum of a diesel engine starting up before dawn, the rhythmic clanking of freight wagons in the distance, the sharp whistle slicing through the cold morning air—it’s a lullaby, a call to arms, a way of life.
For me, there was never another path. Some kids wanted to be footballers, some astronauts. I just wanted to work with trains. And I did—starting as an apprentice, hands blackened with grease before I’d even had my first tea break, learning the bones of the industry: maintenance, signal operation, track inspections. I worked my way up, through decades of change, through the slow death of British Rail and the chaos of privatisation, through budget cuts and mismanagement that turned efficiency into a nostalgic concept. Don’t get me started on what’s happened to the UK railways—I could fill a book.
Then retirement came. After forty years of timetables and shift work, I was untethered. No alarms dragging me out of bed at ungodly hours, no more nights in a signal box with only a flask of lukewarm tea for company. And, honestly? It was unsettling. But Sue and I had a plan—one that didn’t involve watching the British weather ruin another summer. Spain called to us. More sun, fewer bills, a railway system that actually worked. We sold up, packed our lives into boxes, and landed in Barcelona.
Moving countries is an education in patience. Bureaucracy, paperwork, waiting in queues just to be told we needed a different queue. But we got there. Found a small but comfortable flat, close enough to the metro for my railway fix but far enough from the chaos of La Rambla. And the trains—God, the trains. Barcelona’s rail network is a marvel. Modern, clean, efficient—words I hadn’t used about a train system in decades.
Retirement gave me something else: time. Time to do what I actually wanted to do. And that’s how Train Artisan was born. A space to talk about railways, to document the history and the future of train travel in Spain, to dig deep into how this country gets rail right where the UK has gone off the rails. And, of course, a place for my lifelong love of model trains—because you can take the man out of the signal box, but you can’t take the signal box out of the man.
So expect train journeys, deep dives into railway history, comparisons between Spain and the UK, and the occasional detour into expat life. And Sue? Well, she’s long accepted that she married a railway man. She just rolls her eyes when I start explaining track gauge differences over dinner. But that’s love, isn’t it?
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