I HAPPENED to see a programme on television hosted by the late, great Fred Dibnah.

Fred came from Lancashire, like me, and was a celebrity for some time, based on his irrepressible character and the fascinating business of demolishing mill chimneys.

He loved chimneys and I remember one he climbed – no safety ropes in those days – and he arrived at the top and said, “By heck, you could ride a bike round ’ere”. I found the whole thing pretty terrifying.

Anyway, his other love was steam engines and watching the programme took me back to my childhood.

I remember as a small boy crossing a bridge at Preston Railway Station and being covered in steam as a train passed underneath. It didn’t do a lot for the cleanliness of my clothes but it was pretty exciting to a five-year-old.

In Southern Africa, steam played a huge role in the railways for a long time, still being used in places until around the end of the 20th century.

In the early 1980s, I was in Zimbabwe and we made it back to civilisation every weekend, from our field camp, when we reached a town now called Hwange.

A mainline railway ran through the town and, on cold winter mornings, you could hear the loaded goods trains labouring up the slope, an evocative noise. It was a coal mining town and long heavy trains of coal were transported to Bulawayo to the steelworks there.

I was also, at about this time, in a town in South Africa called Kroonstad, a major railway centre, where all the shunting was carried out by steam trains at night and, in the cold winter air, the trains could be heard in every part of the town. It was enormously soothing, in an odd sort of way.