Felix The Railway Cat

Nonetheless, there was something about the railway cat that he found rather endearing. The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual – Felix initially viewed him with suspicion, as she did most people she didn’t know, but that was only because her very real experiences with ‘stranger danger’ had made her naturally cautious.

As the months passed and winter at last turned into spring, it became Mark’s habit to walk down to the bike racks and the Head of Steam while he waited for his train; this was also Felix’s favourite spot. The regular sight of the beautiful fluffy cat on a typically grey Yorkshire day – when it was so misty and cloudy you could see only a silhouette of the distant hills and none of the detail – cheered him greatly. So much so that one day he found himself snapping a couple of pictures of her on his smartphone.

Felix, as had become her way over the years, posed for them with the good-natured acceptance of a celebrity who is constantly being stopped and asked to be part of a selfie. She positioned her head handsomely and waited patiently for the shutter to close. As Mark travelled on the train to Manchester that morning, he casually flicked through the snaps he’d taken. She really was a fine-looking cat: that fluffy fur, those enigmatic green eyes, the striking white bib. He uploaded the images to his personal Facebook page – to say, simply, ‘I see this cat at Huddersfield station’ – and thought nothing more of it. But when he next logged in, he was astonished to see that the pictures had got loads of likes; more than he’d had before on any other photo.

Crikey, he’d thought, there’s something going on here.

He’d imagined there must already be a Facebook page for Felix herself – she had been at the station for four years, after all, and within Huddersfield she was a bit of a superstar – yet when he’d searched for one in the early summer of 2015 nothing had come up. That surprised him. Other railway cats had blogs – Quaker, the Kirkby Stephen East moggy, had one called ‘The Secret Life of a Station Cat’ – and they were undeniably popular. In June 2015, meanwhile, there was enormous interest when Tama, the famous Japanese feline stationmaster, sadly passed away at the age of sixteen after years of dedicated service; she was so beloved that 3,000 people attended her funeral. With that level of interest in station cats it seemed only right that Felix should be on Facebook. Consequently, when Mark discovered she didn’t yet have her own page, he decided to create one

It seemed a good idea in more ways than one, and for Mark it personally meant a great deal. Mark’s job was very finance-based and serious, and he thought that creating a Felix Facebook page could be a real laugh. He thought that it might provide him with a creative outlet, mild-mannered businessman that he was. Rather than spending those ten minutes in the morning while he waited for his train looking at his phone or reading the newspaper, he could do something with and for Felix instead. Something fun. Something colourful to brighten up the dark-grey shades of his regular life. He pulled his laptop towards him and began building the page.

The first priority was to decide what to call it. Should it be ‘Felix, the Huddersfield cat’ or just ‘The Huddersfield train cat’ or even ‘The TransPennine Express cat’? In the end, he went with simplicity: ‘Felix, the Huddersfield station cat’. It took about half an hour to set up the page, then he added the handful of photos he’d already taken … and that was it. Job done. So it was that on 2 July 2015, Felix became a Facebooker.

Mark didn’t like to break the news to Felix, but she wasn’t all that popular. Mark shared the page with his own Facebook friends and she got about fifty likes; then one hundred, as those friends shared it with their friends. But it was small-scale stuff.

That didn’t matter one bit to Mark. As the summer of 2015 wore on, he found he fell in love with running the Facebook page for Felix. It gave a bit of a kick to his morning to come onto the platform and find out if she was there – and, if she was, to stage an impromptu photo shoot and have a bit of a play with her. He enjoyed coming up with ideas for what her posts might be and the more he got to know her, the easier it became to think of what she might ‘say’ if she was running the page herself. By September, being Felix’s Facebook manager had become a bit of a minor obsession. It had added so much to his life that Mark wanted to give something back to the cat at the centre of it all – so he started bringing in treats for her on his morning commute.

Mark didn’t know that Felix favoured Dreamies. He just bought an 80p bag of a supermarket’s own-brand treats – but Felix, as it turned out, wasn’t fussy when it came to the calibre of her canapés.