Regua, Portugal – Locomotive Fitter on Night Shift

Portugal in the early 1970s was a poor country, a flagging dictatorship doggedly fighting expensive, colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola. Where I went, in the cork tree plantations south-east of Porto, to the resort of Povoa de Varzim further north, and to the magical Douro Valley, eastwards to the Spanish border, there were virtually no tourists. I gather it is very different now.

I don't know his name, and he most certainly has never seen this image - but maybe I'll send a link to the town of Regua, in northern Portugal, and a descendent there might recognise their grandad, who knows? This pic is, as I remember, from July, '73.

I caught him one night on the locomotive depot having a break – and yes, this is something of a posed shot – but it is also where he was seated, naturally. I can't remember how I took this photo, it is certainly not a direct flash. I have an idea he had to keep still while, with the camera on a tripod and the shutter open for one or two seconds, I jumped outside and fired a flash through the window.

How much easier it is now – an absolute amateur can do it all on a phone – or maybe not, ... not quite :)

I hope readers don't mind me straying from Hungary and central Europe. I have a soft spot for Portugal, a very soft spot. I went there every summer from 1971 to 1974. The people were lovely, maybe even the man I encountered in the story below – who caused me a lot of bother – was lovely in his heart. I'll never know.

It's funny, I was thinking about Portugal earlier today, and this little story. I even thought about putting it on the blog, but decided not to. I then went out to the post office, and lo and behold, on my return I found an email in my inbox from Jorge, a Portuguese friend, inviting me to a little party.

And that changed my decision. So I'll relate this tale, which I hope will amuse. (I know American reader John C will remember it, he laughs when I tell it.) But writing it may be more difficult. Let's see, at least some of you enjoyed my journey from Ararat to Austria that I wrote about recently, so I hope this works too.

Map of mid-northern Portugal. Regua - named Peso da Regua on this map - is centre. The Douro Valley runs approximately East-West from Spain (off map, to the east) to enter the Atlantic at Porto. Although the railway along the valley was the shortest way into Spain, it was slow and had limited capacity. International trains to Paris therefore headed south from Porto (yes, initially in the wrong direction!) before turning east, across the country into Spain near Salamanca.

It starts, I suppose, in April, 1974 (and just for clarification, has nothing to do with our night-shift fitter pictured). In Portugal, the folks had had enough, there was a sort of palace coup, and the dictatorship was thrown out. Pretty bloodless, I think, though I've never really studied what happened.

Fast forward a month or four. I had a week off my first job that August, and spent that time in and around Porto, photographing the metre-gauge rail lines to the north, from Porto Trinidade to – I hope I've remembered correctly – Senhora da Hora.

Come the Sunday, and I had to leave. No cheapo flights in those days, in any case, I had (almost) free rail tickets. The overnight train into Spain and onto Paris left at about 17.00.

I got to the train in good time, with maybe 25 minutes to spare. I'd not been there long when a man asked if he could join me in the compartment. Of course, there were seats free, and he put his bags up onto the rack above.

Looking back, I should have been suspicious. After all, the train was pretty empty, so why had this gentleman joined me in the compartment? But I was feeling carefree. It had been a hot, summer's day. In any case, after a minute or two, the man got up, gestured towards his cases on the rack, implying that I should keep an eye on them for him, and left to walk down the train. Perhaps to get a coffee?

A few minutes, and he returned. True, he had no coffee, and sat down. He probably tried a few words of Portuguese on me, then, for no apparent reason, showed me his passport. In fact, he gave it to me. It was brand new, and issued by the Portuguese consulate in Marseilles.

Hmmm. Interesting. I gave it back, and said thank you – not that I needed to. After all, what was the need? I hadn't asked to see his passport. But let's be friendly.

The train was now about to depart. The line south from Porto Campanha station has a spectacular view from a bridge over the Douro river. I think the bridge had been built by the Eifel company. (Yes, that Eifel, the famous one that built Budapest Nyugati station.)

I knew this was probably my last time leaving Porto, so I left the compartment and went into the corridor to view the scene, with the larger part of the city to the north, the port wine houses down below, on the Douro's south bank, and the sun sinking at 90 degrees to the train travel, more or less directly to the west. It was a lovely sight for perhaps 25 seconds. Then it was gone, and I returned to my seat.

There, my compartment companion was forever fidgeting and wanting to move. He once again gestured to keep an eye on his bag, and walked off down the corridor. The train trundled on southwards.

A minute or two later, and the ticket inspector came along. Now, as I mentioned, it had been a hot day. I was in shorts, and I was pretty sure my ticket was in the back pocket of my jeans, in my rucksack, on the floor by my feet. But when I looked into that pocket, it was empty. Funny, I thought, what about my jacket? But it wasn't there either. I was flummoxed.

The inspector, needing to get through the train, said he'd come back. It was then that I realised that in my search for my ticket, I hadn't come across my passport. And that man, the one who'd left the bag, hadn't returned. It was mightily suspicious.

A minute or two later, and the train brakes came on. It was the first station stop.

I had to think fast: if the man had stolen my passport as I'd admired my last views of Porto, I had to act. But he'd left a bag. I grabbed it and opened the zip. It contained a jacket and a pair of shoes. Not exactly packed for an international trip to Spain or Paris. I smelled a rat, grabbed the bag and jumped from the train.

Now, if you are going to have your passport stolen there had to be worse places than Portugal to have it happen. I mean, imagine if it were behind the Iron Curtain, especially the Soviet Union. So I was kind of up for this. I mean, it was both a pain and something of an adventure. What do you do? Remember, in those days there was no internet, no mobile phones and very few folks who spoke English.

I'll cut the detail, but I made it back to Porto to discover, God bless the Port winemakers, that the city had a British Consulate. And I made it there, by about 20.30 that evening. Well, I made it to the consul's residence. But I thought a British citizen having passport stolen was pretty hot news, so I rang the bell (or banged on the gate, I forget), and got let in.

Perhaps British consuls worked hard on Sundays, I don't know, but it seemed I'd interrupted the family en route to bed. I can't say Mr Consul was angry, but after I related the story and he checked I'd got enough money for a room that night, I was told to come back next morning in office hours. My personal catastrophe was not going to make the front pages of The Diplomatic Times, it seemed.

I don't know how I managed to find a bed that night – most hotels would demand a passport, which of course, I hadn't got. Whatever, sometime around 10.00 on Monday morning, I returned to the consulate proper.

It was a pretty simple set up. The room was perhaps 7 metres long, with a big desk on one side and some benches for the public on the other. I was the only public that morning.

There was a big picture of Her Majesty QE2 dominating the wall behind the desk, one of Winston Churchill on the shorter wall, and a big bust of Sir Winston on the desk.

The wartime prime minister of the United Kingdom had, by this time, been dead for more than a decade of course. The man in Number 10 by now was Mr Wilson, so quite what Winston was doing here was anybody's guess.

Well, actually, I could guess.

Now, you might understand that on this trip I was not exactly dressed for evening dinner. I'd been travelling for over a week, carrying cameras and lenses, sleeping on trains and in cheap lodgings. And my hair was probably a bit long.

Mr Consul was probably nearing retirement, and, even if he hadn't fought in WW2, his father almost certainly had. Whatever, I quickly got the feeling that Mr Consul was not overly happy with his country's youth and their lifestyle of the early 1970s.

In short, I got the distinct feeling that though he didn't say it, he thought I was a 'hippy-pippy' good for, if not nothing, not much more.

I related my tale of the previous evening, and how I'd assumed my passport had been stolen while I had been looking out of the corridor window.

“Well, you'll need an emergency passport. I don't suppose you know the number of your old one,” he barked.

“Well, yes. P531449A actually,” I replied.

He was surprised at this, but continued to fill in some official paper in front of him.

“You'll also need two passport photos, you won't have any with you I suppose,” he continued.

“Oh, but I have,” said I, pulling two spares I'd printed myself and kept in my wallet for emergencies.

This raised an eyebrow. I think I went up one notch in the ratings from 'hippy-pippy' to just a 'pip'.

“So what do you do?” enquired Mr Consul.

“Oh, I work for the railways,” I replied.

“Hmm. So what are you, some sort of engine driver or something?” he continued.

The stress was very much on 'engine driver', and it was pretty clear Mr Consul did not have a high opinion of engine drivers, even if they had, surely, hauled him or at least his family around the country safely for some years.

“Oh, well no. I'm an engineer,” I said, which was mostly true, even if I hadn't become fully chartered.

“Hmmm! You mean you went to university?” he enquired further, now seemingly seriously intrigued.

“Yes.”

Mr Consul suddenly realised I might almost be fully human after all, more or less.

“Which one?” he asked, now quite enthusiastic to hear the answer.

For a split second, I wondered if I should say Oxford or Cambridge. It might get me invited into the garden for a glass of sherry. But no, I'd be found out, for sure, and deemed an absolute bounder, if not worse.

“Loughborough,” I responded, truthfully identifying my alma mater.

(Loughborough, a modest town north of Leicester, and 111 miles from London, hosted a former College of Advanced Technology which had only gained university status in the mid '60s. It is now renowned for its sporting faculties.)

“Oh,” he said, the enthusiasm draining with each syllable, of which there was but one. He probably didn't know where the place was.

Mr Consul took the photos, applied glue to the backs, and attempted to press them down onto (what turned out to be) my two emergency passports.

Now there was, by the good grace of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the GB taxpayer, an assistant to Mr Consul, a rather shortish, local chappie called Pedro, who mostly tried to look busy in the room despite having little actual work to do.

“Damned Portuguese glue!” a frustrated Mr Consul blurted out as his attempts to stick my passport pics to his forms didn't work out to plan.

“Put Churchill on them, Pedro!” he ordered.

The assistant bravely grasped the bust of the former British political leader – a bust which must have weighed pretty much the same as Pedro's own upper torso - and dropped it onto one of the forms.

Mrs Consul now came into the room. She probably didn't like hippy-pippies too much either, but her motherly instincts took over and she sweetly asked if I'd found a room ok.

Mr Consul, meanwhile, turned to the bag which my thief had left on the train, opened it, and rummaged through the pockets of the jacket.

“Good Lord,” he exclaimed, leafing through a diary he'd found in one of the pockets, “He was a PIDE.”

My thief, it seemed, had an appointment in his diary with a PIDE doctor. At least, that is what was in some random entry penned in the booklet.

That, clearly, explained it all.

Except, you may well ask, what exactly was a PIDE? I too, was none the wiser.

“It was Salazar's secret police. There were lots of them, and after the revolution, they're desperate to flee the country. That's why he needed your passport.”

Only, he, Mr Thief, already had one, nice and new, issued in Marseilles. But perhaps his mate needed one. Or, more likely, he was selling them on.

All indeed was now, sort of, clear.

And Winston's bust having fulfilled its weighty purpose, I picked up my copy of the two emergency passports, thanked Mr Consul and made my way to Campanha station to catch the 17.00 train for Paris.

This time, however, I didn't go into the corridor to say goodbye to Porto.

And if you're Portuguese, reading this and always wondered how come your grandad had a long-expired British passport numbered P531449A in his draw …. well, now you know.

Finally, for my steam-loving friends, one good reason why I, and others at the time,went to Portugal back in the day ...

Engine 281, meet sister 282, at Tua, northern Portugal. These machines may seem like lumps of metal to some, but to myself and others they were beautiful, nay graceful works of engineering. I should really look up the details, but from memory they were built by Henschel, in Kassel, Germany, in 1912. Oil fired, they worked out their final years on the Douro Valley line, from Porto to Barca D'Alva, high up in the arid mountains that form the border with Spain.

I'm not sure when the last they steamed, probably in the late 1970s.

The settlement of Tua, in the early 1970s, felt like New Mexico in the 1850s, minus the guns. There were no hotels, but the narrow gauge carriages in the station could be opened and slept in, albeit on wooden seats.

Today, as I undestand it, Tua is a town of some substance, with a thriving hospitality industry as tourists flock to the vineyards that line the banks of the Douro.

Here's another shot I took in those lazy, hot sunny days on the line, and my first wild fig, picked from the tree:

https://www.perspectives-budapest.com/post/summer-evening-last-train-walk-home

Thank you Tua, Regua and other villages and towns in the region for the happy memories. Please give a like!