Brief encounter: Englishman follows train of thought back to 1958 meeting with Albuquerque lady

I’ve always been intrigued by mysteries set on trains. There’s just something about the atmosphere — soot and cinder, pitch-black tunnels, a collection of strangers, whistles screaming in the night — that sets the proper mood for suspense.

Agatha Christie wrote a few. “The Mystery of the Blue Train,” “4:50 From Paddington” and “Murder on the Orient Express” come to mind.

And there’s the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock movie, “The Lady Vanishes.”

Today, I’m writing about a cold case that originated on a train from Birmingham to Wolverhampton in England 65 years ago.

There’s no crime involved, just the memories and curiosity of an 84-year-old Englishman named Rex Cornforth. And the mystery of a young woman from Albuquerque who came into and went out of his life in less than hour.

Sketchy case

Rex sent an email to the Journal telling how he and three friends, the four of them all 19 at the time, met a young woman from Albuquerque on the Birmingham-to-Wolverhampton train in the summer of 1958.

“(We) were returning from a week-long break at a holiday camp on the Yorkshire coast,” Rex wrote. “We were at the Birmingham train station and a very attractive young lady got into our carriage.

“She was very shy and a bit nervous, but when the train pulled out we all got to talking. She said she was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was heading to the north of England to meet with her husband, who was an American serviceman stationed over here.

“We were so impressed. We had never seen an American before, let alone speak to one. We had never heard of Albuquerque either.”

He ended the email by writing, “If any of your readers see this, perhaps they know someone who was in Birmingham, England, in the summer of 1958.”

Talk about a sketchy case. More clues were needed, so I turned detective, like Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and emailed Rex a list of 14 questions.

Just the facts

Did you get her name? Did you take her picture? How about a description?

“I can’t remember if we asked her name,” Rex responded. “If we did, then I have forgotten it.”

He said he had a camera with him, but believes he had used up all his film, so no photos.

“I can recall she was very pretty and well dressed. I think in a light blue jacket and skirt,” he wrote. “She was fair, petite and I think she was probably in her mid-20s.”

He said he and his friends did not learn more about the lady because she wanted to know about them and England and asked most of the questions.

Rex and his buddies — Bob Farrell, John Farr and Bob Beech — were all engineering apprentices in 1958.

He said the train trip in question must have been in the last week of July or the first week in August because those were the weeks factories closed down for the summer holidays.

“That day was warm and sunny,” he wrote. “The summer of 1958 was a good one, which is a bit of a rarity in the U.K.”

He said the scenery along the tracks between Birmingham and Wolverhampton wasn’t anything to impress an American visitor in 1958 and still isn’t.

“Old derelict buildings, rusty scrap yards, dirty factories and foundries, mounds of industrial waste, rows of terrace houses,” he wrote. “Every few minutes the train kept stopping for no apparent reason. It still does. The lady said, ‘Hey, why do we keep stopping?’

“I said, ‘They’re changing the horses.’

“’What! You have horse-drawn trains?’ the lady said.

“’Yeah. Don’t you?’ I said.

“’Gee. Wait till I tell ‘em back home I’ve been on a horse train,’ she said.”

Rex said the trip with the Albuquerque lady lasted only about 40 minutes. He and his friends got off in Wolverhampton, and she continued north on the train to meet her husband.

“She was a lovely lady, and we had a lot of laughs on that journey,” Rex wrote.

He wonders if she ever found out they were pulling her leg about the horse train.

I suspect she knew at the time they were kidding her and just went along with the joke.

A million to one

Rex, who lives in Wolverhampton today, went on to a career as a freelance draftsman, working with numerous agencies in all fields of engineering.

He and his wife, Chrissy, have been married for 63 years and have three daughters and two grandchildren.

“I am just an average bloke, never been very ambitious or motivated by money,” he wrote. “My family is and always has been the most important thing to me.”

Of his three mates on the train when they met the Albuquerque lady, Rex said he never saw Bob Beech after that day.

John Farr was at Rex and Chrissy’s wedding in 1960, but has died.

Bob Farrell had been Rex’s best friend since they met at a Wolverhampton technical school, and they spent their teen years together. But they drifted apart as each raised young families and their interests changed.

“Bob (Farrell) left the area to live elsewhere, and I have not seen him since,” Rex wrote.

During that 1958 holiday when the four friends were together, Buddy Holly’s music was at the top of the charts. When Rex got off the train in Wolverhampton, he bought Holly’s record “Rave On.”

So now, when he hears that song, or watches the TV series “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” both set in Albuquerque, he is reminded of the day he met the lady from that city.

“The sole purpose of writing to your paper in the first place was I thought it may be interesting to readers of a certain age to see a connection between an elderly Englishman and Albuquerque,” Rex wrote.

“I imagined a situation where there just might be a million to one chance that someone’s mother, grandmother, aunt or even friend was on a train in Birmingham, England, that day in the summer of 1958 and recalled chatting to some cheeky local teenagers.”

Here’s hoping. Mysteries need solving.