Home CEWAP Mark Thomas 18:30 Club GM Food Car Cats Links		The nuclear train protection militia
		For a show in the third series (The Mark Thomas Comedy Product), volunteers were asked for on a dry but partially cloudy day in early November 1998 to turn up at the TV Production company's offices in London at 08:30 AM.  We'd been asked to turn up in combat gear and I had managed to scrounge various items of clothing (including a khaki jacket with "Marilyn Manson" emblazoned on the back) from my family to fit the bill.

A grand day out

After a short while hanging about in the office, we headed outside and got on a coach, which was already half-full of people from Cricklewood. We didn't really know where we were going or why before we got there, but the production team soon told us why we were meeting up with some of the residents of Cricklewood and heading down to the wilds of Kent.  The Cricklewood residents had found out that trains loaded with nuclear waste were to be left overnight at a set of railway sidings there en route from Dungeness to Sellafield.   As you can imagine, they were none too happy at the idea of having nuclear waste in their neighbourhood and had already started to campaign against it.  They asked Mark and Vera to help them out. Further investigations revealed all sorts of scary facts about the transportation of nuclear waste through the UK, one of which was that the trains of nuclear waste have no security precautions worth mentioning, so we were heading down to Kent to mount a people's guard on a train travelling from Dungeness power station. There's a point on the journey down in Kent where the train has to go through a manual level crossing and this was thought to be a suitable place to kick off.  Mark and a film crew hung around waiting for the train. A fnord-mate and myself were hanging about (for about 3 hours!) under a railway bridge with a large banner reading "Saving lives and half-lives" a few miles up the line at the time and missed this bit, but when the driver got out (leaving the train unprotected!) Mark approached him and asked if he thought the security arrangements were up to scratch. Then out popped dozens of other people and a couple of armoured cars (and some curious locals) who formed the "Nuclear Trains Protection Militia" and the fun started! Mark legged it to Lydd airport, dived in a helicopter and followed the train up the line to where there were a few other groups of people loitering at stations and bridges with banners (One proclaiming "Only three nuclear train derailments in 1998"), water pistols and the like.  The rest of the people who'd been at the crossing got back on the coach to follow the train and team up with the other groups at strategic points along the way.  Once the train had made it's way past us all (with a few delays and a few visits from the local constabulary - apparently the locals had reported us as a group of hunt saboteurs!) we all got back on the coach and headed down to the Dungeness visitors centre for part two of the escapade. We all had to pretend we were from an adult education institute and we sat through an interesting (but extremely dull) multimedia presentation on Nuclear fuel by Dr Who (Peter Davison) and strategically declined a tour round the power station before Mark surreptitiously put an "interesting" map up in the centre showing the routes of all the nuclear waste-carrying trains through the country. Then the police put in another appearance when the visitors centre staff rumbled us.  Mark was questioned (lightly) and autographs were exchanged. While the police questioned Mark, a few people staged a nuclear train crash in the foyer. This trip was originally planned for the previous week, but on checking, the research team were told there would be no train running that week.  As it turns out, one did.  They were also told that the train we guarded was not carrying any waste, just empty flasks being transported elsewhere, but seeing as they lied about the previous train, who knows if these flasks were actually carrying waste or not? On the show that this item was broadcast on, the famous train crash footage of a diesel train being deliberately crashed into a flask to prove how safe they were was shown.  Now I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the flask used in that crash looks considerably larger and beefier than the ones on the train that we saw! All in all, a cracking day out, but there was a strange coincidence for me later on that day when my cab driver back in Hampshire told me that he actually worked at Dungeness when it was being built! Weird, eh?