Edward Slow - Travellin Athout ar Ticket
A short anecdote from Edward Slow's teenage years, when the Great Western Railway arrived in Salisbury, Wiltshire, coming down the Wylye valley from Westbury in 1856. The apprentice boys coming from Wilton to Salisbury everyday - including Slow - must have been intensely jealous of the speeding train and longing to have a go, while they trudged three miles along the Wilton Road.
Edward Slow was apprenticed to Silas Burt in Salisbury, from whom he graduated as a wheelwright and carriage builder in Wilton, eventually to prosper and expand his interests into writing of the doings all around him, particularly putting down stories and rhymes in the fast-disappearing Wiltshire dialect. 'The Wiltshire Moonrakers' is his long-remembered piece.
See my website at www.edwardslow.wordpress.com for more on him.
I have illustrated this anecdote with images of the original GWR station at Salisbury, designed by Brunel in 1856, and sitting defunct and derelict for most of the last hundred years. But the platform is atmospherically still there....