Tools of the trade

Whe I was still in short trousers the technical term for trainspotters was 'gricers'. I wonder where this word comes from. Once I heard it suggested that it derives from 'grousers' who go grouse shooting. But our 'bag' was a book full of engine numbers and not dead birds


When we went on our gricing trips we always took with us our beloved Ian Allan abc locomotive listing books. Mine are now carefully packed away in Lancashire - family heirlooms! - but here's a secondhand one I bought a while back in a bookshop near Aylesbury which lives with me in Japan. It says inside that it used to belong to David Richard Barnett of 9 Westwood Avenue, Glenholt, Plymouth and it's the winter 1962 edition. It cost 2/6 - two shillings and sixpence or 'half a crown' in old money.



If you take a peek inside the book you'll see that David used it to summarise his gricing activities. All the engines he 'spotted' have their numbers carefully underlined and 'namers' - on this page some of the surviving Great Western Railway 'Castle' Class - have the name underlined too. A man after my own heart.

Books like this are still published for Britain and Europe by Platform 5 Publications and for North America, where they are known as 'rosters', by Kalmbach and others. You can get books like this for Japan too but they are much, much more complicated for reasons I'll explain another time.

- Iain