A friend of mine and I (around 3rd grade) were looking at a globe and pointing out various places like the United States, the oceans, etc. She then told me that the thick line running around the middle of the globe was the railroad track. It floated over the oceans and allowed people to get to wherever they needed to go!

H Bomb

I thought that Left Luggage at a railway station was on the left hand side and I never figured why there was no right luggage. I finally twigged when I heard the expression when I was in my twenties!

Doh!

My mom always said that if the guy in the caboose waved at you and you didn't wave back it meant you were not wearing any underpants. Imagine a small child standing there waving like crazy and sometimes there would be no one on the caboose.

C.A.

Lots of people here admit shamefacedly to clearing up childhood misconceptions only in their teens or even twenties. Is late sixties a record?

When I was little we used to go for holidays at Brighton. A special train called the Brighton Bell took us there. My memory from age 2 was reinforced for several years by the picture of it in my trains picture book. The name Brighton Bell made perfect sense to me because it was, unusually for that date, an electric train. A steam train on that route would no doubt have been called the Brighton Whistle. I had no occasion to think about it after the age of maybe six, but about thirty years later a magazine article about the history of sea-bathing jogged my mind and I thought "Er, maybe that should be the 'Brighton Belle' ?" But by then I was hardly sure this was a real memory it would have been trouble to find out. So I waited another thirty years for internet and Google to be invented and sure enough the other day found out there was this famous and in its day avant-garde train called the Brighton Belle; images on the net fit with such very pale memory as remains to me.

So that misconception is cleared up now, shows I do get there in the end. I get there slowly but oh yes I get there I get there.

eppenguin

i used to think that in the subway there was a guy in front of the train steering the train around the tunnel, it made me wonder why they made the tunnels so narrow for him.

chris chan

i used to believe that all train tracks were electric. Told to me by my parents to stop me playing on them once.

graeme

i used to believe that.... when trains went over the Forth Rail Bridge in Edinburgh the would go up along the top and back down instead of through the middle.....if uve seen it ull know what i mean

Louise

Although I am too young to remember the old trams in Britain (except in Blackpool), my parents and I have been involved with the National Tramway Museum in Derbyshire for many years and I have been going there from an early age. When I was small I thought the tram drivers just had to turn the controller handle round and round as if it were a coffee grinder, and that the controller handle made the wheels go round and round. So whenever my parents got me to grind some coffee for them in the coffee grinder, I liked to pretend I was driving a tram!

Alan

My friend lived not very far from railway line. During the 'hussle and busstle' of a normal day the trains were not noticed butwith the quiet of the evening and night, the express trains would pass by with the usual train type sounds.... she thought the sound was the moon passing over the house!

Fatboy

As a kid I was often taken to the train station to watch the trains come and go. I observed how the switchmen operated the switches to send trains down one track or another. In this case, they pulled up a lever to change a switch, and the lever seemed to block the "wrong" track, that is the one the train wasn't supposed to go proceed on. I got the idea that that was how the switches worked, blocking the wrong track, so if a train started down the wrong track, it would hit the lever, bounce back, repeatedly if necessary, until it happened to go down the right track, the one not blocked by any lever.

Jeff

when i was little i used to believe that if you stepped over the yellow line on the platform at the train station that the train would whoosh past and you would get caught on it and never be seen again

Bec

As a South London child, going on the Tube was a treat - I used to read the station names on the Northern Line map and believed that space rockets took off from Euston.

Paul

I used to believe that when you went over railway crossings, and did not lift your feet from the floor, they would be cut off

Blondie

When I was little and I was in kindergarden we went to the train station to see a train inside. Then one of my mates said the train was about to leave, but in portuguese, wich is my country, the train leaving can be said like the train is going to brake, so I was really scared, because I thought that the train was going to break by half with us inside

pmaionese

I just read this belief

I used to believe that St Pancras station was actually St Pancreas. It wasn't until I was corrected - at age 21 - that I realised what I was saying...

I'm 38 and have just had a belief shattered!

Anon

I grew up in London, and when my sister was about 4 or 5 my mum said we were going to the underground and my sister cried because she thought we would never come up again.

berry

I used to think that train drivers actually steered, and that it was incredibly hard to keep the wheels of the train exactly on top of those narrow tracks.

I was crazy about trains, but this huge responsability made me not want to be a train driver.

Jos

I used to think that the upper struture on the caboose was the rest room.

Anon

When I first heard of the Underground Railroad I thought it was like a subway passage but a normal train went through it, and while the trains were going through african americans and the Underground Railroad helpers would just be down there selling clean clothes and food to African Americans. I thought that the "rail road" just lead straight to the northern states

Person

As I was little I thought the rails in the city for the tram were electrical - so I never stepped on them, I jumped like a rabbit, as I didn't want to get an electrical shock. Today I know better but I still don't feel well, when I have to cross those rails and I try to avoid, stepping on them... (I am 31).

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