As a young boy, I would walk from my grandmother’s apartment on Leopoldstraat in Rotterdam, along the Goudesingel, finally ‘setting up shop’, so to speak, at the tram stop at Meent. And there I would sit, happily in my thoughts, watching the trams go by. To this day, there is nowhere, literally nowhere, I would rather be, except the massive roundabout at the Coolsingel, where tram lines would converge from four different directions.
Every summer my mum, Elly (not her real name, but that’s another story and no one in the Netherlands called her that, either) and me went to Rotterdam and sometimes I would return to England with Dutch my first language. In the early years, I obviously knew no one, apart from a few family members, so I stayed close to Elly. We had no money so we never went far but that was okay. I was safe and I was happy because I had trams. And I also had trains.
Along the bustling streets we would go to Rotterdam’s epic street market. It is still pretty epic today. Above the market was the main railway line from Rotterdam Centraal, on massive metal arches leading to Rotterdam Blaak, across the River Maas and onto the Netherlands and beyond. I loved the smells from the market, especially from the ‘Patat’ stands, selling huge cones of Patat (chips) with seemingly a litre of Mayo on top. But nothing was more important than the next train, rattling along the noisy arches. I would rush outside the stalls to catch sight of it. Now the arches have gone and the Dutch, always innovators, have buried the trains below ground so you would never know they were there at all.
It continues today. British trains these days are rather drab and uniform, consisting largely of electric and diesel sets but I still find myself drawn to them from time to time, even though for very obvious reasons you can’t get as close to the tracks as you used to be able to do. That, I suppose, is the beauty of trams. You can almost touch them as they go by, ding-ding-dinging around corners, humming ever more loudly, as they gather speed.
I have a similar, although not quite as strong, affiliation with aircraft, although as with trains they are becoming rather dull, mainly twin-engined and, to the untrained eye, indistinguishable from one another.
I don’t take numbers and never did. Just watching the trains, planes and trams was enough for me.
If I could be one place today, it would be either Meant or the Hofplein. Allow me to pull up a camping chair, a flask of the finest Dutch coffee and a Stroopwafel or two and just leave me there until the sun goes down.
