Felix The Railway Cat

Yet it wasn’t all work and no play. As Andrew and Felix bonded, he got to know her personality well and came to appreciate how playful she was. A favourite game during the night shift was ‘hide and seek’, especially amid the tourist-information leaflets in the lobby. The wooden holder that displayed them read ‘Welcome to Yorkshire’, but to Felix’s mind it was more like ‘Welcome to the Best Cat Playground Ever’. She would duck and dive behind the leaflets – and just when Andrew thought he’d caught her, she’d dart out and start a running race with him. He noticed, though, that as she legged it onto Platform 1 and he followed in her wake, as soon as she hit the yellow line she turned left and ran along it, never once crossing it. It was always safety first for the station cat.

Felix liked a bit of rough and tumble, too, playing hunting games and rugby with her soft mouse toys and the moths. Rugby league had been established not fifty paces from the station, in 1895 at the George Hotel in the square, and Felix seemed determined to honour that heritage in the way she enthusiastically rugby-tackled the brown bear that Andrew kicked for her and threw herself into all their games.

Everything at the station could be made into a game in Felix’s mind – even if she didn’t always intend it to be that way. She had a somewhat embarrassing episode shortly after Andrew started at the station that she really had to style out as intentional fun. The station was getting a new computer installed, and Felix was delighted to discover that – when the computer was still inside it – the brown cardboard box it came in made for a splendidly solid, comfortable location for a catnap. The box had arrived at the start of the week but the computer wasn’t being installed till later on, so for the next five days or so Felix got into a regular routine of jumping onto the box and lazing about on top. She was always doing that with various items around the office; another favourite spot for a sleep became the (switched-off) paper shredder, on which she could only just fit; her tail and even her back legs would dangle down, but she professed to be comfortable.

By the end of the week, Felix knew all about that cardboard box – or so she thought. Safe as houses, she believed. But, unbeknown to her, Lisa Gannon, the IT manager, came in one day to set up the new equipment and took the computer out of its packaging – leaving the now-empty box in its usual place.

Lisa was working away when Felix came wandering into her workspace, strutting about with her customary confidence and poise. Up she leapt onto the supposedly sturdy cardboard surface … and fell straight through the open top into the empty box below.

Well, that was a surprise!

Felix quirkily stuck her head out of the top of the box, as though checking if anyone had noticed. Lisa was giggling away at her, so Felix brushed it off with a ruffled shake of her fluffy body. In fact, once she’d recovered her equilibrium and her dignity, she found the empty box made for a rather entertaining setting: she spent at least five minutes sitting happily in it, before jumping out and trotting off to find another adventure.

There was always one about at a station like Huddersfield. As the autumn nights grew colder, however, Andrew realised that some of Felix’s adventures weren’t merely for fun. A lot of the time, they were much more important than that.

One serious issue that railway stations regularly have to deal with is runaway children. Shockingly, 100,000 children in the UK run away from home every year – and many of them, having nowhere else to go in the cold, dark nights, are drawn towards railway stations where there will be light, and maybe food and company, and at least a roof over their heads when the rain is driving down outside. Even in the relatively short time that Andrew had worked at Huddersfield, it was plain it was an issue; the team encountered a runaway child in the station sometimes as often as once a month. They had a duty of care to them, of course, so they would step in and call the authorities, so that the children could be looked after and not slip through the net.

It was a particularly bitter Yorkshire night towards the end of November 2015 when Andrew clocked on for the night shift. Christmas was within touching distance and you knew it from the weather alone. Andrew blew on his hands as he patrolled the platform throughout the early hours of his shift, feeling very glad for the warmth of his thick winter coat.

He cast his eyes up and down the platforms. Used to the patterns of the trains, the team were always conscious of someone who seemed to have been around on the station for rather too long. Andrew’s gaze settled on a young lad further along Platform 1, who had caught his eye earlier too. He’d been on the station for a long time now, so Andrew started walking towards him, wanting to see if he needed any help.