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The Station

from The Railway by Hamish Napier

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

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    A: The album comes in a gorgeous-looking black and white digipack, including a 16 page booklet, artwork and design by the fabulous Somhairle MacDonald somhairle.co.uk. Also includes vintage photos of the Speyside line and Highland Railway taken by photographers from the 1920s up until the '60s.

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8. THE STATION 04 54 [H Napier]
Aye Busy! / Homeward

My neighbour, Muriel Grant (92) of West Anagach farm remembers Grantown-on-Spey East station, “When the boys Fraser and William were just young, I used to take them o’er to the station to see a’ the trains comin’ oot and in, you know?...Oh it was a busy station, mercy aye...aye' busy!” When Muriel’s friend Rita Templeton was at the school in Grantown, she and a big bunch of the other Nethy Bridge children were let out of the school early each day to take the train home. “At 3 o‘clock sharp they’d a’ run like hell away doon the auld road to the station to get the train home to Nethy. Rita said it was just a great experience getting to take the steam train home!”

Muriel‘s father-in-law, William Grant was the signalman at the station around the same time as James Telfer. Being a signalman was a job of great variety, as James explains, "you did everything, goods come in on the wagons, you sorted that out, you was general, you did everything....there was none of this 'I don't do this because it's not my job!’" James logged the train times, sold the rail tickets and exchanged ‘the token’ with every driver for the stretch of single track. The coal merchant would bag the coal straight out of the freight wagons and load them into his lorry. Local farmers would bring lorry loads of tatties and livestock to load onto the wagons. In October, wintering sheep arriving from Perthshire were taken directly from the station on foot to local farms many miles away, and then returned in the Spring. During the war when rationing was in effect, there would be large crates full of wild rabbits for food and clothing. Sometimes a basket of homing pigeons would arrive on the passenger train from Aberdeenshire for racing. James would have to carry the basket onto the railway bridge to set the birds free - they'd circle round a couple of times and then disappear back east. He would make a note of the time of release and send the note with the empty basket back home to their owners. Often a Knockando sheep dog would be tied up in the guards van of the passenger train to be sold to new owners in the south. Sometimes the very same dog would be seen making the same southbound journey a week or so later, which meant it must have escaped shortly after its arrival in Perthshire and managed to run over a hundred miles back home to Strathspey!

TRACK PHOTO: Signalman James Telfer chats to the driver & secondman.

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from The Railway, released August 2, 2018
by Hamish Napier

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Hamish Napier Grantown On Spey, UK

Hamish is a multi-instrumentalist and composer from the Scottish Highlands.

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