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Postscript Just After So Coalville depot No 2 (or Mantle Lane) was gone for good. The prefabricated BR building stood locked cold and empty. Even now, 13 years later, I often wonder what the signalmen who manned Mantle Lane box thought after we'd all gone. They were still kept busy but not with engines coming on and off shed but to accept and offer Bescot - Bardons. I still came up the branch and even went onto our old holding sidings more than once to get water for a class 31. Alien classes were now a routine part of my job; no longer was it a thrill to have a class 37 or the new class 60. We would wait ages to enter Stud Farm as there was always another train in front of us loading. Many Bescot men would secure and leave their train on the neck at Bagworth Junction - the exact spot where all those years ago Cyril Kendrick and I almost ran into a gang of platelayers. So the situation entailed a lot of light engine running to and from Bescot as crews bailed out due to bad time. I would arrange to go onto the shed just to enter our old depot building and offices shorn now of all but basic equipment and anything technological had long gone. As I sat sipping tea and chatting cheerily to the ex-guards the Bescot trainmen eyed us sympathetically. Their depot had never closed. The older Bescot guards knew what we must have been feeling, but the younger newer ones must have wondered what all the fuss was about. Whenever I passed by the old shed I would stare hard at the windows, remembering all the things that had taken place on the other side: the rush of us young chaps hassling our roster clerk on a Thursday afternoon for Friday off to go to our night clubs; the smoking fax machine in the office; my two days of torture whilst passing out on MP12. Though Coalville depot was gone, daily life on the railways didn't change that much for me. I was to have another serious collision (Between 47340 and E85103 the latter being withdrawn) and a class 58 (58001) very nearly on its side with 3 wagons off, in Drakelow about a mile and half as the crow flies from Mabs' 58019 do. But neither incident was my fault. Another time, just seconds after my companion Bescot driver asked if I'd ever had a derailment, we dropped off the rails in Bescot with the Tyseley breakdown crane. But that was due to the state of the rails. With my mutual exchange to Saltley and three years with RFD I was to suffer many incidents and blow-ups. Not with Class 20 slow speed modules but with time-expired Class 47s which blew up and failed themselves. By the mid 90s these ageing machines should have been on leisurely trip working down some short branch instead of being thrashed to bits on freightliners. With a full digger on to Wembley, Eastleigh, Crewe, and all the rest of the destinations of this country we visited, I endured more failures during this period than any other time, with so many incidents that it would require another book to log it all. Present day. After an enjoyable 7 years at Saltley I reluctantly left to go to Toton, a depot that had been a favourite from my spotting days of the early 1970s. Toton will always mean a lot to me for that reason. Though there is still a good percentage of ex-Coalville men at Toton, I had now joined the ranks of the very men who took our work before and after we closed. None of it was their fault, though, and it was, and still is, a fine depot manned by a good bunch of blokes. With all the present-day red tape none of the tales in Life on the Leicester Line would be allowed to take place on this modern railway of ours. They'd be a serious embarrassment to it. Still, even though we are all older now and the job is slightly more mundane but I still record the day to day events in my diary. The depot today. Now and again, after visiting old mates or taking the family shopping, I have spent a couple of minutes looking over the locked gates (just to have a look at the dereliction process that the years bring as they pass by). Only roads Nos. 1 and 2 are left. A red HBA wagon has stood forlornly on number 1 road for many years. The only other wagon, long forgotten by TOPS, is an ordinary HAA coal hopper on the stop blocks on the longside roads of Mantle Lane. Over the years many young saplings have grown up around it and obscured it from view. In April 2002 I phoned the signalman at Mantle Lane box and asked ask him to describe the scene today. Regular branch signalman Keith Waters told me that the old depot building has recently been boarded up and is due to is demolished, along with the old brick building near the box. Mantle Lane box has been re-painted in Midland colours, but alas has a nameboard but no letters. A rail grinder stands on No 2 road ready to depart to work on the branch. The branch is still used from Burton end for access to Drakelow C, Hicks Lodge and Swains Park, and from Knighton direction for Bardon and Stud Farm. The future. Lounge sidings are used by Toton crews to run round trains of empties for Hicks Lodge, but it is down for closure as a distribution park is rumoured to be built on the site. There is also a glimmer of hope that the branch will one day re-open to passenger trains and stations built, especially at the site of the new Conkers Discovery centre built on the site of the former Rawdon Colliery but we'll have to wait and see. As for me, in May 2002, I opted out of the freight side after 23 years. Having most recently worked for private freight company EWS (English, Welsh & Scottish Railways), I am now employed by Midland Mainline at Derby and enjoying a very different kind of traindriving.
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