Felix The Railway Cat

19. The Final Hurdle

Felix gazed up at the iron roof girders with an increasing sense of annoyance. The crows were sitting up there, looking down at her, staring her out. Now aged two, Felix wasn’t quite so terrified of them as she had been as a kitten, but that didn’t mean that the crows were any closer to showing her the slightest sign of respect. They would cockily fly down to the platform and walk around when she was on duty, as if she was nothing.

Felix wasn’t going to stand for that. She would prowl at them, then rush at them, but they would merely rise into the air like supersonic spaceships, fly up to their iron roost and sit there, cawing down at her. They seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in winding her up, knowing there was nothing she could do about it.

They even teamed up to do it. One day a single crow left the safety of his perch and landed on the platform. Felix was out and about and he had started crowing at her. There was a mocking tone to his caws: ‘na-na-na-na-na’. Felix had narrowed her green eyes and started to creep towards him. She had not got far before her attention was diverted by a second crow, who swooped down and landed behind the cat, so that Felix was like a piggy-in-the-middle between the two birds.

‘Na-na-na-na-na,’ the second crow chorused. He and his buddy were now either side of Felix, taking the mickey out of her as her black head flicked in frustration between them, as if she was watching a tennis match. She made a decision and started to edge towards one, but then changed her mind and tried to go for the other. The crows thought it was a great game and continued to tease her, cawing loudly, until Felix lost her temper and rushed at one of them. Then both took off with a colossal flapping of their inky wings, and Felix was left behind. If she could have growled, she would.

What was probably most annoying for Felix was that the crows were the only creatures who didn’t show her respect. For Felix, at age two, had blossomed into the most beautiful adult cat you can imagine, and everyone else she encountered seemed to fall at her fluffy white feet.

Her fluffy coat was what attracted people’s attention first. She really was the most remarkably downy cat, and her regular trips to the grooming parlour and Felix’s own attentive ablutions ensured her coat was kept in tip-top condition. Her fluffiness went all the way down to her tail, which acted as a glorious boa for this glamourpuss; Felix was constantly draping it over the edges of the furniture she was sitting on and flicking it back and forth as she swung her hips and sauntered about the station. It was her eyes, however, that really had her admirers swooning. They were those classic reflective cat’s eyes, a gorgeous pale green, like summer grass, but with a hint of silvery moonshine to them. With those, and her enormous white whiskers fanning out from her ebony nose, she had the loveliest little face. She had finally grown into her pointy black ears with white tufts, too. The whole look was enhanced by the pretty pink collar Angie had bought for her, and that shiny hot-pink tag. Whichever way you looked at it, Felix the cat was all grown up.

But there remained one final hurdle Felix had not yet managed to clear. Perhaps mindful of her colleagues’ warnings when she was a kitten, Felix had not yet crossed the train tracks.

She stuck to the side of the station she’d grown up on, and her manor comprised Platforms 1 and 2 only. There was plenty to entertain her there: the bunnies bounding around near the tunnels, the abandoned carriage, the lost-property office and the sanctuary of the bike racks. Though as a kitten she’d been carried to Platform 4 via the subway, riding like a feathered parrot on Gareth Hope’s shoulder, Angela Dunn reported that she never used the stairs herself. So with Felix obeying the painted warnings to ‘keep behind the yellow line’, there was no way for her to cross to whatever magical world might lie beyond the tracks on Platform 4 – or further afield.

Yet as she grew older, Felix found that she wanted to explore that world. The Huddersfield team had almost come to believe that she would never cross to the other side – but never was a very long time.

So, as Felix glared at the crows in that early summer of 2013, perhaps she watched them with a certain amount of envy, too. They had the freedom to fly wherever they wanted, but Felix’s world was bordered by the bright yellow line.

Nevertheless, she was an adult cat now. Maybe, just maybe, she was old enough at last to learn how to walk the tracks safely, like Dave Chin and the shunt drivers did in their orange hi-vis uniforms.

Well, there was no time like the present to find out. Felix got up from her favourite position by the bike racks and gave herself a little shake. She yawned, showing her sharp white teeth and her rough pink tongue, and stretched along her tippy-toes. She was ready. She was going to try.

She walked nervously to the yellow line on Platform 1. There were a few customers milling about, but it wasn’t especially busy and no one was paying her much attention. She looked left; she looked right. She listened hard. By now, having lived at the station for two whole years, Felix knew the schedule of the services possibly better than anyone else around, and indeed a train was not due. She walked to the very edge of the platform, and bunched her paws together on the ledge. To a human observer, it might have looked reckless, but Felix knew exactly what she was doing, and how to do it safely.

With one powerful leap, she dived off the edge of the platform and down onto the tracks. Once more she paused, listening with every potent sense she had, with her front paws balanced on the first metal rail. There were no vibrations through it. Cats are very sensitive to the slightest tremors; they are said to be able to detect earthquakes ten or fifteen minutes earlier than humans can. But there were no pulsations on the rails at that moment; no train was anywhere nearby.

Grey gravel had been laid out between the two metal rails that formed the train track running beside Platform 1. Felix now picked her way across it carefully. As she crossed the second rail of this first train track, she paused once again, her front paws safely across the rail and her back ones still on the wooden sleeper, as the ridge of the rail touched her fluffy belly. She stood as still as a statue, assessing, adjudging, and then determined it was safe to move on.

She had made it successfully to the midway point between Platforms 1 and 4. Beyond was another set of train tracks, the ones that ran alongside Platform 4 – but Felix suddenly decided that two sets of tracks was rather too much to tackle on her first trip out. Halfway across would do for today.

She turned back to face Platform 1, seeing her home turf from an entirely different perspective for the very first time. Felix carefully checked both ways before once more crossing back towards Platform 1. At the foot of the sheer wall she paused, gazing up at the precipice above. The platform was awfully high up. Yet she had confidence in her abilities. In one lithe, athletic jump Felix ascended from the tracks to the platform, and once more crossed back over the yellow line. She was home and dry.

She had an even greater desire to explore.

To begin with, however, her track-crossing adventures were always curtailed at the halfway point. She would get so far, then turn tail and retreat. But Felix’s courage and confidence were building by the day, and soon she felt secure enough in her knowledge of the railway to cross not one but two sets of tracks and make it all the way to Platform 4.

Angie Hunte, watching her little cat making her way in the world, thought that Felix’s new accomplishment in learning how to navigate the tracks safely needed formal recognition. On the railway, employees have to complete what is called a Personal Track Safety (PTS) course before they are allowed to work on the tracks. As walking on the tracks is so dangerous, employees are not allowed to set foot on them until they are in possession of a PTS certificate to show that they have successfully completed their training. They are also issued with a PTS ID card, bearing their photograph; these cards expire every two years.

As it happened, around the same time that Felix completed her own personal track safety ‘exam’ and became adept at crossing the tracks, maintenance man Dave Chin’s latest PTS card expired.

‘Could I have that please, Dave?’ Angie asked him, a smile playing on her lips and a twinkle in her eye as she cooked up a little plot.

‘’Course you can,’ he told her, intrigued.

So Felix was soon the proud bearer of her own, personalised PTS card, granting her the authority to walk on the tracks. Angie carefully stuck a photograph of Felix in the appropriate space on the cream-and-red card, then scribbled on it in a black marker pen: ACCESS TO ALL AREAS.

It was official: Felix had the run of the place, and she had a PTS card to prove it.