The last time we saw Geoff, he’d somehow ended up living a semi-off-grid existence outside Lleida, building things that didn’t need building and fixing things that weren’t broken. Some men retire and buy a golf membership. Geoff appears to have retired into a permanent engineering experiment.
Sue had been asking when we were going back.
Not because she particularly enjoys standing beside railway lines discussing wagon configurations for three hours. More because she likes Geoff’s wife Carol, who possesses the patience of a saint and has spent the last forty years quietly preventing Geoff from accidentally redesigning civilisation.
We drove over on a warm Thursday morning.
The plan was lunch.
The reality, as always with Geoff, became something else.
By eleven o’clock we were standing beside a freight line just outside town. Geoff had spotted a locomotive in the distance.
“DB Cargo,” he said immediately.
It was a tiny shape on the horizon.
I couldn’t even tell it was a train yet.
“German operator. Mixed freight. Probably heading north.”
The thing eventually rolled past several minutes later.
DB Cargo.
Mixed freight.
Heading north.
He hadn’t guessed.
He’d known.
This continued for most of the morning.
A container train appeared.
Geoff identified the operator.
A locomotive passed on a parallel line.
Geoff identified the class.
A rake of unfamiliar wagons appeared.
Geoff explained what they carried, where they were built and why the design had changed.
It was one of those moments that reminds you railway knowledge is often a strange thing. The public sees trains. Railway people see hundreds of tiny details layered on top of each other.
By lunchtime I realised Geoff could probably identify most freight movements in northern Spain faster than he could identify a vegetable.
Then the phone incident happened.
Carol asked him to show us photographs from a recent trip.
A simple request.
An ordinary request.
The sort of thing millions of people manage every day.
Geoff opened the wrong application.
Then another.
Then a weather forecast.
Then somehow changed the language settings.
At one point Catalan appeared.
Nobody knows how.
Not even Geoff.
Five minutes later he was staring at a blank screen as though it had personally betrayed him.
“You had the photo open two minutes ago,” said Carol.
“I did not.”
“You did.”
“No.”
“You absolutely did.”
Meanwhile the man had spent the morning identifying freight locomotives from half a mile away.
I found this oddly reassuring.
The world likes to pretend technological competence is a single skill. It isn’t.
Some people can build a locomotive.
Some people can configure a phone.
The overlap is surprisingly small.
After lunch we sat outside with coffee while Geoff explained why modern freight still fascinates him.
Passenger trains get attention because people ride them.
Freight trains quietly keep entire economies functioning.
Containers.
Cars.
Steel.
Food.
Fuel.
Things arrive where they’re supposed to arrive because somewhere, usually late at night, a freight train has done its job.
It reminded me of the freight yard I wrote about in Night Freight.
Most people never notice those trains.
They notice the station.
The ticket office.
The departures board.
The freight train passes through the background carrying half the country’s shopping.
By mid-afternoon Geoff was explaining wagon types again.
I noticed Sue exchanging a look with Carol.
The look said exactly the same thing.
The men are talking about trains again.
The women have accepted this as inevitable.
Eventually we headed back towards Barcelona.
As we left, Geoff shouted something about a locomotive he’d seen the previous week.
I didn’t catch all of it.
Neither did he, I suspect.
But he was happy.
And that’s probably the point.
Not everyone needs to understand smartphones.
Not everyone needs to understand freight trains.
The world works best when a few people remain gloriously obsessed with things the rest of us barely notice.
Geoff happens to be one of them.
And if a freight locomotive appears on the horizon within fifty miles of Lleida, there’s a decent chance he’ll know what it is before the driver does.
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