A while ago, I was fed this little gem from 1973 by the YouTube algorithm, and I found it absolutely fascinating. I thought I’d share it with you.

I think it’s really interesting because it’s a glimpse into a world that has almost entirely vanished, and also a fascinating look at a man’s life, and what motivates him. There’s also a lot in it I can relate to myself.

It was made the year before I was born, so my earliest memories date back to about 1978. The thing that surprises me about this film is just how old-fashioned everything looks, although that was an interesting feature of where it was shot. Sudbury & Harrow Road station is on the line into Marylebone station in London, part of what is now Chiltern Railways. Back in 1973 the line had an uncertain future, and had been deprived of investment for a long time. Indeed, it was only seven years after the closure of the Great Central Main Line, and commuters like the ones in the film were the only ones left using the trains to Marylebone. Much of the infrastructure – as can be seen – was still Victorian. Particularly surprising is the gas lighting at the station. In the past, many railway companies negotiated very cheap long-term gas supply contracts for lighting, and they were generally honoured until they expired, the result being that gas-lit stations survived until the 1980s in some places. For a lightly-used station like this, it wasn’t worth spending the money on re-equipping with electric lights.

The station survives today, with a similar peak-hours-only service pattern, although it’s unstaffed, and was completely rebuilt in the early 1990s, with all the old buildings swept away. The trains were replaced around that time too. It’s now the least-used station in Greater London, mainly as there’s a tube station with a much better service nearby, but at the time I suspect the Elmer’s End to Sanderstead line was probably quieter (it closed in 1983). Oddly enough, though, a lot of similar jobs to the one in the film survive on the railway network, and I actually had one, twenty-one years later, when I worked in the ticket office at Effingham Junction station. Various things had changed, but it was recognisably similar.

The biggest difference was that the traditional cardboard Edmondson ticket of the Victorian era had been replaced by APTIS, British Rail’s first computerised ticket issuing system. APTIS was crude by today’s standards, but when introduced in 1987, it was pretty revolutionary, automating a lot of accounting functions and making the issue of tickets a much simpler job. It’s long gone now, mainly because it couldn’t support Chip and PIN payments, but it set the standards for the systems that followed, including the format of the railway’s credit card-sized orange tickets. APTIS also couldn’t store enough data to cover all the fares on the system, so often I’d have to type things in manually if people wanted unusual tickets. It therefore came with a shelf full of telephone-directory-sized fares manuals. Nowadays, you can issue tickets on a phone or tablet, that just connects to the internet and digs out what you need. Pah! Kids don’t know they’re born these days!

I didn’t have to do any cleaning or maintenance at Effingham Junction, and I had trains all day, but my shift similarly ended at about 2pm, and after about ten in the morning, when the commuters were all out of the way, the place was pretty dead. I always enjoyed that. There’s something to be said for the peace and quiet of it, and so I can relate to our man Mr. Siddiq in the film, quietly doing his duties and not having to worry about too much. Back then, I was a spiritual man myself, a devout Christian in my case, and I wasn’t averse to reading my Bible or praying during the quiet moments between trains and customers. Like him, I valued the free time I had due to my early finishes, and I ended up working at that station because it wasn’t staffed on Sundays, and going to church was a big part of my life back then.

It’s worth noting the pay. That £22 a week in 1973 is the equivalent to about £235 a week now, which interestingly enough is almost exactly what I was earning at Effingham Junction in 1994, for almost exactly the same hours. Factored up to 1994 standards, that £22 was equivalent to about £115, so I was earning, in real terms, about double what Mr. Siddiq was. I know life in London was pretty cheap in 1973, but I can see why that job was hard to fill, and he must have had to live a pretty austere life to cope on that money. Railway pay is now extremely generous compared to a lot of jobs, bizarrely a unintended consequence of privatisation, which ended up giving the unions quite a lot more clout (the Tories didn’t think this one through). BR for many years could only afford to pay extremely low wages, but offered generous travel perks as an attempt to compensate for it. Nowadays, the perks aren’t so good, but the wages and pensions are pretty decent.

Jobs like this do still exist, although they’re harder to find – ticket offices are something of an endangered species with the spread of digital and self-service ticketing, and most lightly-used stations are now unstaffed, with cleaning and maintenance carried out by mobile teams. But, if you’re a quiet, reflective type, and fancy a job that suits, you can still find them. I wonder what happened to Mr. Siddiq? I’m assuming he’s long gone from this world, given that this film is over fifty years old and he looked middle-aged in it, but I’d be curious to know how much longer he spent at Sudbury & Harrow Road, politely serving his passengers, cleaning his station, thanking Allah for his blessings, and loving his home and his family. He has a quality that has so often eluded us, peace of mind. I think maybe he could teach us all a thing or two.