Track Bashing with Scotsman Transport Correspondent Alastair Dalton

Scotsman transport correspondent Alastair Dalton meets up with some railway enthusiasts with a rather unusual hobby

Transcript

00:00I'm Alastair Dalton, the Scotsman's Transport Correspondent at the Polnody Train Care Centre

00:17on the south side of Glasgow. It's holding an open day for the first time in 25 years

00:24to mark its 150th anniversary and also the 200th anniversary celebrations of the modern railway.

00:32I've come across a new phenomenon that I'd never heard of in decades of covering railways

00:40and that's known as track bashing. If you wonder what that is, it's people who on this occasion

00:49travelled on this train behind me from Derby to try and cover as much of the rail network as possible

00:56but on this occasion they spent last night going up and down the various tracks or roads

01:03in this depot south of Glasgow Central Station to try to cover every inch of track as part of their

01:12quest to cover the whole of the network. I spoke to one of them about why they do it.

01:16The railway enthusiasm has many facets or many aspects. Everybody's sort of train

01:23scutters who try and see a train. There are also traction bashers who try and get pulled by or

01:29travel in every train and my facet of the hobby if you like and my main concentration is track,

01:36what they call track bashing colloquially. So you try and travel over as many different railway lines

01:41or even railway yards or tracks as possible. And what will you be doing at the Polardy rail depot

01:50in Glasgow this afternoon? Right, the idea when we go to Polardy, I'm not sure of the exact plan yet,

01:56but broadly speaking, is we'll go in and out of the sheds and the yard area. So where my track

02:04atlas at the moment is not coloured in red. Hopefully within the next couple of hours that

02:09some of those lines will become, with the aid of a red biro, covered in red because I'll have traversed

02:16them. So that's it, it's collecting lines, shall I say. And how much the rail network have you

02:22track bashed? Well, in the context of all the passenger tracks, say in the UK, all of it,

02:27but I've also traversed pretty much all the passenger tracks in about 12 other countries as well.