I grew up in a bungalow, the garden was pretty big (by English standards), next to the garden was an allotment that was owned by the ‘welsh witch’ that lived in the bungalow behind. Just on the edge of the allotment was the train track. Relative to our house it was about 50 yards away. Anyhoo, to give you an idea how it affected me, I remember my 8th or 9th birthday I had a party and a friend stayed over that night. when everything was quiet later on that night, he suddenly said to me ‘WHATS THAT!?!’, to which I replied, ‘whats what?’, ‘whats that noise’ he said, concentrating I said ‘oh thats just the train’.......
Because I’d lived with the sound for so long, I didn’t even notice it, I think my brain just switched off to the noise to the point where it didn’t even register.
A bit like when your lying on your back trying to go to sleep and you start to snore but you can’t hear yourself snoring.
The only bad thing about the railway line was that on the other side of it was a marsh where we used to play ‘man-hunt’, and also catch ‘great crested newts’ (which turned out to be a protected species?......(we had about 20 in an old plastic fish tank one summer!......), anyway, instead of taking the slightly longer route over the bridge, unbeknownst to mum and dad, we’d just hop over the tracks and into the marsh. We used to do this almost every night of the summer for about 4 years say.
The UK electric lines would fry you in a few seconds if you were to fall on them…....
I can remember running over those lines many times without a care in the world other than being caught by the station master who was about another 50 yards down the track.
If you look on google maps and search for ‘Maghull Train Station’, you can see the marshland we used to play in as kids.