Re: Re:Childish things was Re: That Age Thing- bus spotters and bashers

----- Original Message -----
From: Ground Zero Games <jon@gzg.com>
snip
> Generally, a true "Trainspotter"  not only spots trains, but writes
down
> the locomotive numbers in a little notebook.... but the ones that
REALLY
> scare me are the bus spotters....
>
> Jon (GZG)

A kid in the year below me at school was a fanatical bus-spotter, and in
addition to his notebooks full of registration numbers had a shed in his
garden set up with a steering wheel and driver's seat.	He would sit in
there in a driver's uniform, playing commercial recordings of bus
engines
(!) and fantasizing about driving a Routemaster round Dorset, or some
such
oddness.

It must have been something in the water- one of my classmates had a
subscription to a magazine called "Tug-Lovers Digest".

A variant of the trainspotter is the "basher" - these worthies attempt
to
travel from A to B behind a single specific type of locomotive.  As one
who
has been trapped on a slow train from Dingwall with a coach-load of
them, I
can confirm that A is cheering, and B is out of luck.  Three hours of
basher
lyricism ("you always dream that one day you'll ride to Chingford behind
a
Type 37, and now it's gone forever...") alternating with basher humour
(just
as you'd imagine it) is not an experience I'd care to repeat.

Rob Paul