by David Finlay (1 Jan 00)

On this dawning of a new year (not, despite popular opinion, a new century or millennium, but don't get me started on that) can you really blame me for experiencing a little flush of nostalgia and looking back with a smile and, who knows, perhaps a tear over the highlights of the last twelve months? You can? Well, see if I care.

I've never cared enough to count, and you wouldn't be interested anyway, but I suppose in an average year a motoring writer will drive eighty or ninety different cars. Of these, fewer than a dozen will be anything other than perfectly acceptable machines which deserve to sell in their tens of thousands before drifting off into history.

A very tiny number will be absolutely terrible, and while we're on the subject I must say that one thing I enjoyed about 1999 was that the Asia Motors Rocsta was no longer available and I therefore had no reason to drive one. An equally tiny number are quite brilliant - or, at least, I would like to own them, which comes to the same thing.

Occasionally one particular driving experience relegates all the others to Division Two. It doesn't happen every year, but it did in 1999. I am not referring to the hour I spent thrashing round MIRA in various Citroen Saxos, or the afternoon sliding Porsche Boxsters at angles up to and including 180 degrees.

Nor do I mean any of the guest drives I was lucky enough to get in various race cars. These were all marvellous, but they are as one with the dust compared with my three miles on the footplate of a steam railway locomotive.

I can't remember the name of it, or how old it was. In fact I'm a bit hazy on most of the factual details because I wasn't paying much attention. I was back in a mindset I hadn't experienced for decades, when I had excitedly said, "Mummy, I want to be a train driver!" "No, you don't," she said, and there for a while the matter rested.

Until now. I had already spent twenty minutes learning the basics by going up and down the length of the platform at the restored station, in a shunting engine which was as long as I am tall and had the straight-line performance of a goldfish. Blowing the whistle was the best bit, of course, but the business of starting, accelerating up to 3mph, holding it there for a few yards, and stopping without too much of a jolt was wonderful too.

The bigger engine - black, noisy, smelly, very hot and about thirty feet long - was the real classic, though. The basic principle of driving was the same as with the shunting engine: heave the direction lever into Forward or Reverse as appropriate, blow the whistle, release the steam brake, push the equivalent of the throttle and apply the silly grin as you start chugging along.

But the bigger engine looked like a real train, not like a witches' cauldron on wheels, and it had power. After a few minutes of terrific acceleration, by which time I was looking anxiously at the trees whizzing past and wondering if the laws of physics could possibly permit the wheels to stay on the tracks, I asked my guide (whose name, I think, was Steve) what speed we had reached.

"About 20mph," he said. "We'll get up to about 25 before we're finished. Of course, in the days before diesel a long-distance steam train would cruise at over 70."

Blimey, I thought, tightening my grip on the handrail all the same.

"There's a level crossing coming up in about two hundred yards," Steve added. "Get ready to blow the whistle."

I didn't need to be asked twice. Once the commotion had died down I thought about the weight of the train - even of the several hundred gallons of water it carried, never mind the metal bits - and asked what happened if anyone or anything disregarded the whistle and started to cross right in front of us.

"They finish second," said Steve.

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