Felix The Railway Cat

Felix had the run of the station, but there were two places from which she was banned: the staff mess room, where her colleagues ate their meals and snacks; and the underground labyrinth of abandoned rooms beneath the station (Felix didn’t even know of their existence). She soon had a catalogue of favourite haunts: the bike racks, the abandoned carriage, and the lost-property office. The latter was like a little magnet to Felix, for she absolutely loved it in there. She’d wind her way in, give an affectionate greeting to Angela Dunn, then leap up onto a shelf and fall asleep, snuggled up in someone’s lost hoodie or wrapped in a stranger’s scarf.

Though there was nothing stopping her from crossing the tracks, Felix never did. Her ‘training’ from the team had worked well; or perhaps it was just her instincts that told her she shouldn’t cross the yellow line. The team had worried about her doing that a lot; and with good reason. The station cat at Barnes, Roger, had lost most of his tail under a 455 one day; and he was one of the lucky ones. However, when Gareth asked some of the train drivers he knew about the possibility of Felix getting hit by a train, they’d scoffed at him good-naturedly. They never hit cats, they said. They hit dogs and other animals, but they never even saw cats on the track; the vibrations of the oncoming trains were evident to most felines so early on that if a moggy was wandering about, it had fled long before the train loomed into view.

But it wasn’t just the trains on the tracks that worried the team. Cats can jump up to six times their length, but even with that special skill, for a kitten like Felix it was an awfully long way down to the tracks from the edge of Platform 1 – and even if she had survived the leap, she might not have been able to get back up to safety. Luckily, she never tested her ability.

Far more interesting to Felix than the lure of the tracks were the customers. And in fact Felix – despite her reputation for laziness – turned out to be far more diligent about her station-cat duties than anyone might have expected. Given the freedom to go anywhere she wanted, Felix chose – day after day – to take up her post at the customer-information window, where she’d sit for hour after hour, her tail flicking back and forth rhythmically, as though it was a pendulum on a clock. Felix became quite a talking point for customers – she started many a conversation between a commuter and a customer-service officer, and everyone went away happier for the exchange.

As the weeks unfolded, and the bite of autumn started to nip the air, Felix settled into her new role as meeter-and-greeter extraordinaire. And it wasn’t long before she showed that she was great in a crisis, too.

As it had been in the former office layout, the customer-information window was linked to the now-much-smaller announcer’s office, so it was usually the announcers who dealt with any enquiries; along with Felix, of course. Some of those enquiries were pleasant and polite exchanges – which platform do I need? Can you tell me the next train to Leeds? What time will the 16.46 arrive in York? On other occasions, however, when trains had been delayed or cancelled, or there were emergencies on the line, the customers coming to the desk could be rather irate at finding their travel plans thwarted. As Gareth knew all too well from his time on the gateline, hell hath no fury like a traveller stopped in his tracks.

He was sitting at his desk on a late turn one evening when a gentleman came to the window. Unfortunately, a train to Manchester airport had been cancelled and the man was in a pickle, desperately worried that he and his family were going to miss their flight. During the day, there were trains roughly every fifteen minutes or so to the airport, but it was now approximately 7 p.m. and another wasn’t due for quite a while – and the family hadn’t left themselves much time for their journey.

‘I want a word with you,’ the man said crossly at the window. Felix was asleep in the in-tray on the desk at the time, and she stirred slightly at his raised voice and blinked open her big green eyes.

‘Certainly, sir,’ Gareth said politely, coming over to the window. It was a tricky situation for the railway team to be in, as all they could do was apologise for the cancelled service and say, ‘You’ll have to get the next train.’ But when a customer was worried and wound up, as this gentleman was, it was almost impossible to appease them.

As Gareth had feared, his words fell on deaf ears. The man – who was in his fifties and stockily built – launched into a tirade of complaints; he was really rather furious. His family stood beside him as he fumed, his wife nodding her head at his words, and the little boy and girl clearly dismayed that their holiday might be ruined.

Then the man started to shout.