Railway safety.

[davywavy]

One of my more unusual memories of childhood is of a nightmare that I had. Like most childhood memories, it's quite dim and distant now, but I distinctly remember having a dream in which a school held its sports day on some railway lines. The children would run up and down the lines, and periodically a train would come along and squash some of them. It was quite a graphic dream - there was lots of blood, and there were weeping children and doctors trying to find who owned which leg and so forth. It's rare I remember much about my dreams, but this one clearly made an impression as I can remember it pretty clearly even now.

Anyway, after decades of thinking this had just been a juvenile nightmare, I discover that it wasn't a dream at all - it was in fact a safety film which I had been shown at school warning me of the dangers of playing on the railway. This must have been when I was about seven, remember. I mean, if you showed seven-year-olds films like this at school now, I'm pretty confident that someone would be arrested. Certainly, there'd be some harsh words about it on Twitter.

Comments

[sherbetsaucers.livejournal.com]

If there was a brass band, I'd hang out on rail ways all the time!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I think that film explains why I grew up the way I did.

[(Anonymous)]

I watched that without the sound at work and that was genuinely horrifying :/

Laurie

(not signing in to LJ at work!)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I didn't think you even used LJ any more.

[(Anonymous)]

I do still have a current LJ account...but all the entries are set to private. At least I bloody hope they are :p

L

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

OooOOoooOOooh!

Tell me more!

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Oh, Jesus Christ.

I remember being shown videos like this at age seven or eight. There was one called SPlAAT! (Safe Play At All Times) in which a bunch of kids were all maimed and killed while playing at a building site.

Another one, called "Bobby", was allegedly based on a true story about a young boy who loved to play football, but was convinced to take a shortcut across some train tracks, leading to an accident where he lost both feet, and which left his sister so traumatised she never regained the power of speech. This was shown to us by a former train driver, who also shared his alarming repertoire of horrible, horrible stories.

The school was next to a flimsily-fenced train line and near a level crossing, so some level of rail safety education was probably in order. My parents still live in the same village, and I've never heard of any accidents on the line involving children. Probably because they start trembling and adopt a thousand-yard stare whenever they get within fifteen yards of it.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I remember the film about the boy getting his feet cut off, complete with poignant closing shot of his football boots hanging, forever more unused, on the back of his bedroom door.

I'd always assumed that this was the nightmare I'd had in reaction to that film, not an actual film itself.

[vampyrefate.livejournal.com]

The one I remember is kids playing frizbee by a power station, and then climbing up a pylon to retrieve said frizbee when it got stuck. At the risk of sounding like an old duffer, do they still teach kids this sort of thing?

[cavalorn.livejournal.com]

JIMMYYYYY!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

They showed me that one as well!

Awesome.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

I remember this one too

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

A few minutes of Googling later:

Robbie is a 13-minute long film made by British Transport Films in 1979 and revised in 1986. Although it is not strictly a Public Information Film, it is often considered to be so by fans of the genre. The film, which was shown in schools all over Great Britain, is based around a young boy suffering a disfiguring and/or fatal accident when he trespasses on a railway line, with three different versions being made to demonstrate the dangers of both electrified and non - electrified lines. When it was first released, all three versions were narrated and introduced by Peter Purves, later replaced by Keith Chegwin when the films were revised. Robbie was written and directed by Ronald Dunkley and produced by James Ritchie. It was a replacement for the controversial and extremely graphic The Finishing Line, and was itself later replaced by a more modern film called Killing Time.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Right, so I was younger than seven when they showed me this film, if it was replaced in 1979.

Blimey.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I've just asked two nearby work colleagues (one a few years older than me, one six years younger) if they were shown these sorts of videos as kids. Neither were.

I feel properly victimised now.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It's possible that they have simply blotted it from their memory.

Safer that way.

[vampyrefate.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised you were upset, what with a state owned train.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Socialism is the sort of nightmare that happens when you're awake.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I personally love the unbridled Army of Darkness-esque carnage of Forklift Driver Klaus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo).

[chrisvenus]

Wow... This is horrifying...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I was six when they showed it to me. SIX.

[chrisvenus]

I'm 35 now and I reckon I might be scarred for life... I guess it gets the message across though... Though having said that I did think on the event where they are trying to cross the tracks before the train comes that they were all useless. They just tripped over their shoelaces or something!