As an inmate at a boarding school in the West Country of England in the mid-1980s I was unlucky enough to live in a house which had participated in one of the technology world's most celebrated failures: we had a Betamax video player.
That meant that by about 1986, when no new movies were being produced in the defunct format, we were left with about six films which we saw about three dozen times each. I don't recall the names of the others, but one of them was The Titfield Thunderbolt, a 1950s comedy about a steam train.
It is probably a charming film. But we all hated it, mostly because familiarity breeds contempt, but also because it was beloved of our unloved housemaster. He loved the film so we hated it, and grew to hate the whole idea of steam trains. We had a similar relationship with cross country running and the prohibition of alcohol.
All of which is a hopelessly long-winded way of saying that I was not naturally well disposed to Andrew Martin's novel, Murder at Deviation Junction, featuring "Jim Stringer, Steam Detective", a mystery set on the railways of northern England in 1909.
And that just goes to show that many of the prejudices we pick up in our youth - broccoli, girls, whisky - for few good reasons, should be put away with other childish things.
Andrew Martin has wonderfully recreated a fascinating world, when the train was engine that ran Britain and populated it with people devoted to its peculiarities and charm, one in which timetables are sacrosanct and those who stoked its fires and stood on the running boards were kings of all they surveyed. Perhaps, if Martin had been my housemaster, I could have become an enthusiast...
Stringer, the steam detective, based in York and generally charged with tracking fare dodgers and lost baggage swindlers, is returning to York (via Whitby) from a fruitless trip to Middlesbrough where he had been pursuing an early version of the football hooligan, finds himself stuck in snow in the Cleveland Hills, where he is on hand to witness the discovery of the corpse of a rail photographer in an unused siding.
Being ambitious - and up for a promotion to Sergeant which also carries the distant possibility of persuading his wife to pose for him clothed in nothing more than her elastic boots (you'll just have to read it, I have no further explanation that I can make sense with) - he decides to investigate despite being off his patch geographically and finding himself in conflict with his bullying boss.
In this he colludes with Stephen Bowman, roving reporter for The Railway Rover (steam lines had their own press as well as their own detectives) and the trail leads him from the drinking dens of Fleet Street up the Midlands, Northern and Highlands lines all the way to Scotland, where the trail leads to a group of men who previously traveled the Whitby line in the exclusive confines of their own Club class carriage.
If that all sounds unlikely, then nobody was more surprised than than me to be utterly charmed by the world of steam. I particularly liked Jim Stringer, an everyman sort racked with all sorts of modern afflictions: a social-climbing wife, career path uncertainties, financial worries and daydreams about elastic boots.
The plot is mostly very tight although the diversion to Scotland felt like little more than an excuse to explore distant rail services, and the writing is witty, engaging and natural.
Suddenly I am intrigued by steam, and the Martin back catalogue beckons.