“Hop on, hop off, like a bunny rabbit!” Chris Griffin is urging holidaymakers to climb aboard the land train on which he has just spent a cool £200,000.
“The more the merrier.”
Eventually, its carriages packed with the 50 passengers Torbay Council licenses it to carry, the land train leaves its stop outside Torquay’s Derwent Hotel and sets off in the blazing spring sunshine.
It will be back in an hour, having visited the town centre, the harbour and Torre Abbey. Along the way its passengers will have hopped on and hopped off, like bunny rabbits, all for a £7 all-day ticket.
“Why would I ever want to do anything else?” says Chris as he proudly watches his little green engine – brand-new from a factory in Italy – pull its carriages away up Belgrave Road.
“This is the best thing I have ever done.”
The man who once decided “I want to be Barnum” turns 83 this month, but he has no intention of retiring just yet. The land train is just the latest chapter in an extraordinary saga.
Born in Weymouth in 1943, he earned his lifelong nickname ‘Wiffer’ from the fact that his brother could not pronounce his full name of Christopher.
The family home was bombed in the closing years of the war, and Wiffer and his brother slept in a tent in the garden for a time while their parents rented out their room.
By the age of seven he was earning money every weekend, dragging a makeshift trolley down to the town’s railway station and carrying holidaymakers’ cases to their hotels. He and his brother spent the money they earned on model railways.
He then helped his mother in a nearby fish and chip shop – half a crown for cod and chips back then – and saved his money to buy a new bicycle. When his mother took on a seafront kiosk selling home-made toffee apples, the young Wiffer served ice creams.
By the age of 17 he was living the dream as a teenage seaside photographer, taking snaps of holidaymakers and handing them two postcard-sized prints for 2/6d by tea-time the same day. He admits he developed a keen eye for the girls.
Chris hasn’t seen the Oliver Reed film ‘The System’, which was filmed around Torquay and paints a vivid picture of a young man’s life as a seaside snapper in the 1960s, but his vivid tales sound very similar to those in the film.
Torquay land train operator Chris Griffin(Image: Guy Henderson)
Other jobs followed. He joined a small team exhuming the bones of German prisoners of war from a Dorchester graveyard so that they could be given a proper ceremonial burial elsewhere.
He moved to London and delivered fine wines around the capital for a firm that counted the Royal Family among its customers.
Then he went into the bri-nylon business, when modern, affordable, quick-drying shirts were all the rage, and wearers were prepared to put up with the occasional snap and flash of static electricity from the man-made fibres.
He moved on from selling other manufacturers’ shirts on market stalls to making them from scratch, and counted Trago Mills founder Mike Robertson among his early customers. Chris would deliver shirts to the Liskeard Trago store and then, he says, wait until mid-morning until the store had taken enough money to settle the bill.
But tastes changed, and bri-nylon customers turned to imported cotton shirts instead. The business collapsed and Chris was made bankrupt. He lost his large family home at Seavington in Somerset and was faced with starting all over again.
From a kiosk on Weymouth seafront he sold new-fangled digital watches and cassette tapes. He was even taken to court for selling an umbrella on a Sunday, in contravention of the strict Sunday trading laws of the time.
But the kiosk wasn’t enough.
“I got fed up with that,” he says. “I wanted to be PT Barnum.”
Taking a leaf out of the Great American Showman’s book, he sunk what money he had into a 3D Cinema attraction, billed as ‘A New Dimension in Entertainment’. He collected it from Zurich in a truck with dodgy brakes and flat tyres, then brought it back to Weymouth.
It showed the standard 3D film fare of roller-coasters, racing cars and rampaging tigers, and he took it around the country including a spell on Southsea Pier during which the entire cinema was almost blown into the water by the backdraft from a passing hovercraft.
When the wind finally did blow the cinema to smithereens one night in 1990, Chris had to start from scratch yet again.
His next seaside role was as the conductor on a land train operated by a friend in Weymouth, and when Torbay Council expressed an interest in having one 28 years ago, he jumped at the chance to run it.
The service began in Paignton, where Chris also operated the famous four-seater Surrey Cycles for hire on the seafront.
He later took his red and white land train to Torquay, where it attracted sponsorship from local newspaper the Herald Express and took triumphant Torquay United directors and guests on a promotion tour of the town in 2004.
Chris now spends his winters in Thailand and his summers in Torbay. He lives just off Paignton seafront with Patricia, his wife of 55 years. The couple have two daughters.
Chris Griffin sings Elvis Presley
There is another surprising string to his bow, too. He is an accomplished Elvis Presley impersonator, and performs for crowds of tourists in Koh Samui as well as doing more local shows in Devon.
‘You Were Always On My Mind’ is his most-requested Elvis number.
Up and down the country land train services are struggling to make ends meet, and some are being wound up, with escalating costs the main reason. A train like the one in Torquay – engine and carriages – costs around £400,000 all in, while insurance has ballooned to £14,000 or more.
But Torquay’s service is in safe hands with an operator who sees the resort on an upward curve, despite having too many empty shops and the well-publicised anti-social behaviour issues around the Castle Circus area at the top of town.
Holidaymakers still enjoy its magic.
“You see the tourists’ faces on it as they travel around,” he says. “A lot of seaside resorts are struggling, but we’ve got all these new hotels and the council is doing its bit with things like the new harbourside development.”
The reliable little land train service is starting its 21st season in Torbay, and its new Dotto engine should keep it running bang on time. Dotto has been making land trains in the italian region of Veneto for 60 years, and Torquay’s new arrival represents the state of the art.
It will do a maximum of 17mph and can handle any of the seven hills on which Torquay is reputedly built. In hushed tones its driver tells me it has even been up some of the steep slopes behind Market Street without missing a beat.
On one test run it would only do 11mph flat-out, but a call to the manufacturers revealed that a limiter had been left on by mistake, and a tweak to the motor’s electronics restored it to full power.
Behind us the Torquay land train has just completed another loop of its route and is pulling away with a fresh load of holidaymakers on board.
A proud Chris Wheeler watches it go, then says: “I’m going to go on doing this for as long as I can.
“I still enjoy it, and that’s my baby, that train.”
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