Ever since he can remember, David had a two-track mind. At least that is how it seemed to him. Long before his fifth birthday, before he could read Robert Louis Stevenson’s clickety clacking children’s poem, From A Railway Carriage, he was evacuated with his mother to Shropshire during the War.
The pssssht sounds, the smell of burning coal, the steam-filled stations, the spectacular grandeur of the locomotives and the speed, oh the speed, ‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches / Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches / And charging along like troops in a battle / All through the meadows the horses and cattle.’
Railway magazines, train sets, Edith Nesbit’s tale of three children who move to The Three Chimneys house by a railway, and the Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s stories of Thomas The Tank Engine and friends and The Fat Controller, reinforced David’s childhood passion. No surprise then that David was an ardent trainspotter by the age of 10. As committed to trains as any 14-year-old could be, David not only joined the school railway society but became its chair and increased membership to 300.
David would later say that he became A Fat Controller in his own right serving British Railways for 36 years as clerk, stationmaster, manager and head of safety policy, and working in the last decade of his career on the railways as a consultant on international projects.
It was in this capacity, en route from Australia, that David found himself standing in the middle of the crowded terminus station of Churchgate in Mumbai. A young girl covered in dirt came up to him on the platform begging for money. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Not having any change, he waved her away, prompting her to take out a whip and start lashing her own back. Though David, in a panic reaction, got away from the station as quickly as he could, the memory of the girl haunted him.
David couldn’t let the experience go. At first he learned more about the fate of street children through Amnesty International. Applying his own extensive knowledge of safety principles and risk assessment, he started to research causes and consequences. The simple facts were that some families stuck in poverty had reached such a point of desperation that they sent their children out to work often years before their tenth birthday. These children often became lost or found themselves in railway stations where they were preyed upon. Others ended up in the stations because they were escaping abuse or violence at home. Some were simply orphans with nowhere to go.
So much had been said and written about the causes of children ending up on the streets and the terrible impact it had on them. Some charities were active, trying to take preventative measures in the poorest communities, but no single organisation was focusing on the action of early intervention, of giving children like the girl who had approached him in Churchgate station, the basics of food and drink, a safe place to sleep at night, and protection from the unscrupulous. What David cared about most was getting to children like that little girl first in the earliest hours and days of being out alone.
David saw no prospect of any train arriving to deliver early and direct support for street children in India or anywhere else. Undaunted by the scale of the task and not put off by the vast numbers of poor, abused, exploited children around the world roaming in stations like Mumbai’s Churchgate, he resolved to construct and control better outcomes for as many children as he could.
In 1995, standing under the clock in London’s Waterloo Station, surrounded by railway colleagues and supporters, David’s charity, The Railway Children, was launched. An early departure was the development of a Child Friendly Station concept in India, run in partnership with the railway police and authorities. In its first 30 years across India, The Railway Children has provided child help desks on station platforms, offered safe spaces and temporary care for children, reunited and supported families, and trained railway workers on safeguarding. In 2023 alone, more than 3,700 children, found on India’s railway system, were protected and given help.
Tanzania and the UK, too, have become hubs for The Railway Children, a charity that now raises over £3 million each year and supports more than 5,500 young people annually across all of its operations.
In spite of his remarkable story and transformation from trainspotting enthusiast to railway lifer to philanthropist, David Maidment OBE can most easily be found online as one of the writers of Thomas The Tank Engine episodes for television.
Yet the truth is that David was never The Fat Controller, but The Fast Controller: a man who recognised the appalling outcomes for the poorest and most vulnerable children in an environment that he knew so well; a man who acted quickly by building The Railway Children as an engine for philanthropy.