Watching The Steam Trains From This Bridge

A Memory of Croydon.

This railway footbridge was one of my favourite places as an eleven and twelve year old lad, back in 1946 and 1947.
I would stand for ages in the centre of this bridge just waiting for the next steam train to rumble and thunder beneath me. Clouds of steam and smoke would billow up, strongly smelling and smutty stuff but highly exciting too! I would try to count the trucks or carriages as they passed below. Some of the freight trains seemed endlessly long, truck after truck after truck - with tons of coal uniformly filled and neatly mounded. I was not "train spotting", or collecting engine numbers or anything like that. It was just the sheer joy of seeing and listening to these fascinating machines pass beneath me on this super footbridge - so long ago, but still as fresh as ever in my memory.