Steam and Mist
Written by our Writer-in-Residence at Sittingbourne Steam Railway, Dan Thompson
It’s eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, and I walk to Margate Railway Station in a sea fog so thick you can’t see across the bay. But I can tell that the tide is half-out, from a distant susurration of sea on sand. And gulls are hauling, far off, muffled. But on Platform 3, this one immature gull, this Kentish sea-cob, comes close. It’s not a busy time, here and there a few, waiting for the train along to Sittingbourne. And a baby gull looks up at me, big black eyes and a big black beak, but mottled misty soft grey feathers.
The woman next to me is watching the gull warily. Jill – short cropped hair, no make-up, the tan you get from being outdoors regularly. With a rucksack, an oversized water bottle in pocket on the side, and a hockey stick propped against it. It’s a sport, she tells people, where you can be as good in your forties as you were in your twenties. Better, even. In a tough sport, she’s fearless — but she doesn’t like birds.
Along from us, a young couple have been down to Margate for a night out, and are on the early train back to the flat they share in London. Barely in London – it’s old Kent, actually – but it’s London. Chris didn’t get up in time for breakfast, after sitting up half the night smoking and watching TV on his phone. He looks at the vending machine on the platform: “£2.50 for a cereal bar.” And Claire says, “I’ll transfer you the money.” She knows that he isn’t the one, but the alternative is being single again, and finding a new way in and out of the dating apps. It’s easier to accept what she knows she doesn’t want, rather than face another string of minor disasters that become more funny stories for her friends who have been more successful at dating.
There’s a harsh metallic screech from the Javelin train as it turns the corner, up from the Ramsgate yard and into service for the day. And after a few moments, waiting for the door button to flash, and then that brief pause after pressing before it clicks and neatly slides aside, and we’re in, Chris and Claire at the next door along, and me and Jill turn different ways into the carriage.
At Westgate-on-Sea, we’re joined by a warp of women wearing different versions of the Arsenal kit. The Gunners are playing Newcastle tomorrow, up at St James Park, and it’s the start of a long journey up there. They’re going to make a day of it in London, before catching the train up from King’s Cross, two hours and forty nine minutes to Newcastle. They’re helving, catching up on the week’s comings and goings, telling stories over and under each other, and across a loose web of work and the older looser friendships that come from living on a small island all your life. They talk about a friend who’s absent, who lives below London.
And Derek the photographer gets on, down from Gloucestershire for a week of taking pictures of trains along the North Kent coast. He’s frustrated by the sea fog, but on the way to Sittingbourne’s steam railway, where the Met Office weather app on his phone says it’ll clear by 11 o’clock. He first came to Sittingbourne in the 1970s, as a teenager, just after the little railway had ended its industrial life and entered its state of preservation. And he’s excited to be back, for the railway’s Gala Weekend. He likes a good three quarters shot of each locomotive he photographs, without any passengers or visitors. For nearly fifty years he’s taken much the same photo of every one of hundreds of steam locomotives, diesels, and modern engines, with only the staff in his photos. As if the world is just him, and them. All the stations empty, nobody on the platforms waiting, all the trains – and the drivers, firemen, guards, stationmasters, signalmen and P-Way workers – all there for him and his Canon AE-1 camera.
The consecutive doors between the two carriages slide open, one then the other, the automatic door sensor on the second a little slow so the woman coming through has to wave at it, she’s a mother with a small child..The child talks half-gibberish, but has some early words and some well-tested sentences. “Don’t fall down mummy,” she says. “I won’t. It’s wobbly because the train is moving. We’ll walk to daddy.” The child asks, “Where’s the captain of the train?” and they move up the carriage as she corrects him, “No, the driver”. The sea mist is thick outside, and the line is never far from the edge of the Thames Estuary, and at the stations it’s hard to know where we are. So maybe it’s a captain we need, with sea-charts and compass and dead reckoning. Overhead, the scrolling carriage sign has blinked into blackness, as if it can’t quite work it out, either. It is searching for a GPS signal that just isn’t there.
Through the fog, there’s the occasional glimpse into the backways of the houses agin the railway embankment. And then we’re out into the countryside, and the mist drifts apart to show a man standing on the balk of a feld. There’s a stream runs down the boundary agin the balk, the water in it absolutely still and reflecting the mist. It’s a wide white line of white, and so still it looks less like water, more like blank paper. Behind him a grovett, the distinct shape of an old oak at the centre, just a smudge. And in the feld’s headlands, stands a heavy horse, and a farmhand in a waistcoat, and an old wood and iron plough. Just a glimpse, in the fog, the train is moving and they’re all gone, behind us in the past.
Down the carriage, somebody is scrolling through a series of films on their phone. Kate Bush sings “But everytime it rains…”, and then a voice says “Each part of the river taught me a new thing, it felt like we were returning, returning back to how we were as little children,” and they scroll back to play it again, …”as little children”, and then somebody laughs, before a female voice sings “together we will teach the world this legacy, this history, this urgent vital call for peace” over a violin that loops and repeats and builds in intensity.
And then there’s another un-named station. The train slaggers as it passes a man dressed in an old-fashioned station-master’s uniform. Not today’s practical, easy-clean, cut-price uniform or even the old dark blue British Rail one, with the French Foreign Legion-style hat, but an older uniform, from the Big Four days. Southern Railways. A double-breasted worsted overcoat, two rows of polished brass buttons, red embroidered SR initials on the collar, and a peaked cap. But the train passes him and when it stops, he’s away in the fog. The platform is narrow, empty, metal railings with swirled hearts made from the taller railings where each panel joins.
The door slides open at the other end of the carriage, and a teenage girl called Summer gets on. White trainers, tight black jeans, straight dark hair and dark eyeliner, and a fluffy white coat, over a short T-shirt that shows a pierced bellybutton. She has a big, slumpy bag over one shoulder: she stayed out last night, and it has her make-up bag, pyjamas, and yesterday’s clothes in it.
And through the closest door, Don and Bill, in suits with shirt and tie and waistcoat, both wearing flat caps, get on.The two men sit down, across from me, facing each other over the table. They have thin, pale skin like a page from an old exercise book, and worn-in lines. Their faces look dusty. They’re talking about work – technical talk about engines and presses and esparto grass and rag pulp and the wet end – about working in a papermill, for Lloyds. “It’s a shuckish machine, No 8, when it’s mizzling, and not good when you have to carry sheets across the steen,” says Bill, and Don says, “Shall we have beaver or here, as it’s damp?” And Don takes out an old Oxo tin, and Bill a canvas bag, and they start eating a breakfast of bread, apple, and shared Shippam’s paste, spread from the jar with Don’s pocket-knife.
And then there’s the sound of a whistle from the train, and another from where the man in uniform was, down the platform, where a dim lantern swings in the mist, and there’s the solid wood-and-metal clunk-click of a final train door being slammed shut, and a phuff phuff phhhuff that grows in strength from up front, and a smell of coal-smoke, and the lights blink out as we move forward towards Swale, Medway, into the never-ending thick cold sea mist.
Written for Railway 200, started on a visit to Sittingbourne’s Steam Railway Gala on Railway 200 weekend, 2025.
Thanks to Kent Archaeological Society for their Dictionary of the Kentish dialect, compiled by Camilla Harley; and to Derek Nisbet at Talking Birds, Coventry for lyrics from It Takes A City.