In a typical 1970s independent record shop (I'm thinking of "White's of Alverton" here, Penzance residents), it wasn’t uncommon to find a section marked “sound effects”, generally in between the “humour/spoken word”
& “miscellaneous” sections. This would generally be filled with hi-fi test records and those BBC sound effects LPs of which Paul Weller was so fond. But it would often include a subdivision of
albums consisting of recordings of steam engines. This flummoxed me as a child,
but as I grow older it makes more sense. These albums weren't intended to be
used to help create your film soundtrack or to check your tracking
alignment. They were an entertainment in themselves, a nostalgic look back at a
bygone era.
Which brings me to “An Enthusiast Remembers” (Sentinel JW 1). It’s an
album of recordings made at Shrewsbury, Talerddig, Lancashire & Yorkshire
during the last years of steam traction on British Railways, collected &
annotated by Jonathan Wood. Not being an expert on steam locos, there’s very
little I can say about the recordings, so I’ll simply quote the nostalgic,
evocative sleeve notes...
“It is still dark, and there is only a murmur of traffic
from the distant main road as the 4.10am Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth Mail coasts
in towards the signal box, slowing to pick up the single line token from the
apparatus opposite. As the train passes, the driver opens up purposefully, and
the train heads towards Westbury. The countryside is quiet again, and then just
before dawn the signalman can be heard replacing the token for a goods train
following at 5am. This time with a heavier train the engine is working harder,
and the sounds bursts out from under the road bridge just before the box, and
the driver picks up the token without slackening pace. After the train has
passed the sound is carried back on the light air, gradually picking up speed
into the distance.”
It's all there, isn't it? I don't even need to include a sound file. Indeed, there's not much more to add, except to say that it’s difficult to see
how these recordings wound up being released by Sentinel. There’s no local
content (the recordings weren’t made on any South-western lines), and the
copyright date is 1988, long after Sentinel shut up shop (or so I believed), so
I’ve no idea quite who or what made the connection. And Sentinel didn’t exactly
have a history of marketing this type of album, though a fair few of them wound
up in that “miscellaneous” section I referred to earlier. But there in the
credits, it states “Thanks...for endless patience in remastering the tapes to
Job Morris of Sentinel Records”. 