Sue said we should treat it like a date, so I wore the decent shirt and left the railway cap at home. Barcelona to Lleida on a morning high-speed set, coffee in paper cups, the landscape slipping from coast to dry riverbed without asking our permission. You forget how tidy the fast line feels until you’re on it again: steady pressure in the ears, a cabin hum that makes conversation honest, signals that arrive like punctuation instead of surprises. Under an hour later we rolled into Lleida Pirineus, and I had that old resident’s twitch to check which platforms were standard gauge and which were not. I didn’t. I behaved. Mostly.
The plan was simple. Short hop on the FGC branch toward La Pobla de Segur, jump off at Balaguer, then get scooped up by Geoff in a suspiciously clean pickup. If you’ve never taken that branch, do. It’s single track, request stops, a tidy diesel set with doors that still make a satisfying clunk and a driver who means it when he whistles out of the loops. The river stays on your left like a polite dog and then forgets you, the cuttings get tight, and the old stations do their best impersonation of postcards. It’s the sort of line that reminds you why you fell in love with traffic that doesn’t need a road.
We sat behind a pair of kids who were counting tunnels and got it wrong every time with great joy. I watched the passing loops more than the scenery. Habit. The whole dance still makes me happy: held at red, freight clears, points snap, feather to proceed, away you go. FGC run it like they mean it, which is rarer than you’d think on branch lines that missed their own obituary by a decade.
Balaguer, sun already hot, and there’s Geoff with that grin that got him into trouble when we were all twenty-five and immortal. Carol waved from the passenger seat and told us to get in before the almond trees stole the breeze. Ten minutes of farm road and we climbed to their off-grid place: panels flattened to the roofline, a small wind thing that turns when it remembers, and a battery cabinet in the shade that looked—be still my heart—like a miniature substation. I said so. Geoff said, “Exactly,” with the triumphant voice of a man who has finally found a use for all the evenings he watched me explain feeder stations with salt shakers and forks.
Lunch first. Always. Carol put out tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes and bread that fought back when you cut it. Then the tour. He’s built the place like a driver diagrams a diagram: clear flows, obvious isolations, labels you can read, nothing that needs an apology. PV array into a combiner, into a tidy DC disconnect, into a hybrid inverter that hums when the washing machine goes sulky. Battery bank racked clean, cables dressed like they had a uniform inspection. I poked a lug with one finger and he slapped my hand like we were back in the depot.
“What’s it make on a good day,” I said.
“Enough,” he said, the way railway people answer when civilians ask about top speed. Then: “Four kilowatt peak, seven on paper when the wind helps and the gods are awake. We live under three most days. Kettle still wins.”
He showed me his load sheet. Yes, of course he has one. Morning spike when the well pump kicks. Afternoon dip. A silly, sharp bump at 19:32 which turned out to be his habit of boiling the kettle twice because he forgets he already did it. I suggested a small red lamp by the kettle that says “You’ve just boiled me, mate.” He wrote it down like it was wisdom.
And then, because we are us, we ended up in the workshop with the tin of spanners that has no right to still exist. On the bench: a pair of OO gauge bogies from one of his English Electric models and a printout of the Class 47 brush plate diagram we argued about in the comments last month. The delight of this blog is that people care enough to correct me; the pain is that Geoff reads you and then phones me with a laugh that says I owe him a pint. We swapped the pickup wipers for the phosphor bronze set I’d posted, bent an angle wrong by exactly the same wrong amount twice, swore, unbent, rebent, and then watched the thing run sweet across a filthy length of nickel-silver like it had never known a bad day.
“Look at us,” Sue said from the door, “grown men, good weather, and we’re clapping at a toy.” She sat in the shade with Carol and did the serious friend talk I’ll only hear the highlights of. That’s our marriage now: parallel tracks, radios on, same destination.
Late afternoon we went out to the old halt at the end of their track to watch the branch come through again. Request stop, little platform, the sort of place where kids still wave. I timed the dwell, because of course I did, and felt stupidly pleased when the guard gave the right hand signal like an old textbook illustration. You can keep your brand films and your ads with drone shots. Give me a driver leaning out of a cab checking doors, and I’ll give you a happy pensioner.
We rode back down to Balaguer in the pickup for the return train and stood in the shade like lizards. Geoff looked younger than when he’d pulled into the car park. Off-grid suits him. He still talks like a man who could set fire to a month with a bad idea, but now his hands go first to the isolator, not the throttle. That’s age, and not a bad sort.
“Come up next time on the heritage run,” he said at the station, “when the vintage set’s running the gorge. I’ll bring the proper camera and you can be insufferable about coach classifications while Carol and I pretend to mind.”
“Yes,” I said, too quickly. Sue squeezed my hand like she’d already booked it.
Back in Lleida we had twenty minutes until the fast train home. I popped into the hall to see if the ARMF boys had anything in the sidings. They didn’t, or if they did I missed it while buying water. I used to get sulky about missing photographs. Now I write sentences instead. Keeps the day intact.
We were in Barcelona before the news on my phone had finished inventing a crisis. The city fizzed in that early-evening way it does. On the metro, a kid asleep against his mum’s arm reminded me of the tunnel counters from the morning. I counted his breaths for three stops. Old railway habits.
What I learnt today, and what I’ll forget unless I put it here:
- The fast line can still feel like a miracle if you sit with your hands quiet and watch the masts roll.
- Single track done well is theatre: loops, timing, drivers who care, a river that doesn’t mind being the backdrop.
- Off-grid isn’t romance. It’s a diagram you live inside. Label the breakers, count the kettles, keep the dust out of the inverter, and it will love you back.
- Friends age into the shape of the work they chose. Geoff has turned himself into a careful man without losing the grin. That gives me hope.
Next up here: two things. A short guide to doing the Lleida–La Pobla branch as a day out (request stops, seats with the better view, where to stand for the gorge), and then a deeper dive on pickup wipers vs. stay-alives on 4-axle diesels, with the wiring I actually used and the mistakes I’ll pretend I meant to make. If you’ve done that branch lately and noticed anything different, tell me. If you’ve fettled a 47 and solved the low-speed stutter without a flywheel swap, tell me that too.
We got home, put the kettle on once, and I wrote the label anyway. Small mercy to the evening and an honest nod to the part of me that still times dwells at village halts and smiles when the guard’s hand comes up clean.
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