Felix The Railway Cat

They knew that there was a historic tradition of railway cats – back in the days of British Rail, many signalmen used to have them, and Gareth, who was relatively new to the industry, was forever being told stories by old-timers about how there used to be cats at every depot and how they’d all get wage slips every month – but as far as Gareth and Andy knew, the tradition was now history, lost in the railway’s unstoppable modernisation. Winston Churchill had once been pictured fussing over the Liverpool Street station cat, and the idea of Huddersfield getting its own moggy seemed as much a part of the past as that venerated former prime minister.

Yet despite – or perhaps because of – its far-fetched nature, the fantasy of a station cat became a favourite topic of conversation for Gareth and Andy over the next few months, especially during those shifts when the station clock ticked by agonisingly slowly, and discussing daft ideas seemed the only way to make it speed up.

Working on the railway hadn’t been Gareth’s original career plan. He’d attended university to study computer programming, but two years into his course he’d decided he hated it and couldn’t do it for a living. Needing a job, he’d joined the barrier team at Huddersfield station towards the end of 2006 – but soon found that wasn’t for him either. There were no actual ticketing gates when he’d joined the station, so at that time the gateline team themselves formed the only physical barrier stopping fare-dodgers from travelling without tickets. More times than he cared to remember, Gareth, who was slim, willowy and non-confrontational, had found himself on the wrong end of an altercation with an aggressive customer who had pushed him to the ground. He’d been relieved, after just over a year in the job, to get off the frontline and become an announcer (based safely in the office, behind a glass window), but working at the station still felt like a stopgap: something to do while he worked out what he really wanted to do with his life. But he didn’t worry too much about it; he was only twenty-one, so there was plenty of time for figuring it out.

In the meantime, he really enjoyed working at the railway station. Amongst colleagues, it had a family feel; an atmosphere that in truth went beyond the barriers of Huddersfield and spread across the entire railway network. People who worked on the railway would do anything for each other: it was that kind of industry. Once, Gareth had got stuck down south, but a flash of his rail ID card had had the team at the station there going the extra mile to help him get safely back home. At Huddersfield specifically, many of the twenty-six-strong team had worked there for more than twenty years; they knew each other better than most brothers and sisters. In fact, if you’d been clocking in for less than a decade you were known as a ‘young un’.

Gareth and Andy both fell into that category. Andy was a duty manager, also in his early twenties, who’d been at the station since 2006. He was a dynamic, mischievous man with a rangy figure and heaps of energy. Given the team spent more time with each other than they did with their families – sometimes working nights, as Huddersfield was staffed twenty-four hours a day – it was perhaps no surprise that many colleagues became close friends. Andy and Gareth had hit it off immediately, and their very favourite way of entertaining each other was to embark on flights of fancy with their conversation; they had a bit of a reputation for it. The station cat was just one of their crazy ideas; another was that TransPennine Express (TPE), the company which ran the station, should employ Mr T from The A-Team to do the safety announcements (‘Keep behind the yellow line, fool’), while Gareth was also an enthusiastic advocate of changing all the stairs in the station to slides and pulleys, to minimise slips, trips and falls.

The station manager, Paul, a rather by-the-book sort of boss, was by now used to their ridiculous suggestions, which always came thick and fast. He was a young, good-looking man who didn’t give away a lot verbally, but his eyebrows could speak volumes. Up they would go whenever Gareth put another wacky idea to him, his dismissal and disbelief writ plain across his disapproving face.

Throughout the autumn of 2008, in their natters during painfully slow shifts, Gareth and Andy kept coming back to the suggestion of a station cat – playing with the idea as a kitten does a mouse on a string, batting it back and forth between them and getting more and more excited as they came up with ever more elaborate reasons why the station needed a cat. Gareth was particularly enamoured of the idea that a station feline might calm down irate customers.