A little boy’s dream begins to come true as fire laps at his short and curlies, smoke swirls about his ears and sense of rumbling inevitability is replaced with a sensation that can only be likened to the earth starting to move, writes Ben Bentley.

Ah, the romance of driving a steam train. As I ride on the footplate of the engine called Rocket at Telford Steam Railway in Horsehay, fireman Robert Palmer says: “A steam engine is a living, breathing creature. Driving one is a very physical thing.”

Driver experiences are becoming big business for steam train groups, not least at Telford Steam Railway which is run entirely by volunteers on the hot steam of enthusiasm.

After the obligatory health and safety talk and a brief explanation of how a steam train works, I am part of the footplate crew, resplendent in a boiler suit and driver’s cap.

By modern standards, travelling on a “a great big kettle” is a slow and drawn-out process. With the elements of fire and steam to work with, you can’t simply hop on board, turn a key and go.

My drive is due to start at 10am, but preparations begin more than three hours earlier as I join fireman Robert and Rocket’s real driver Dave Bennett at the crack of dawn to load wood and coal into Rocket’s firebox and spark it up.

Then I’m under the engine, oiling various bits and bobs as the fire takes hold, the chimney begins to smoke and the dragon finally comes to life.

So this is how it was for our 19th century forebears, driving to us the benefits of the Industrial Revolution just a few miles from this very spot.

The driver experience is like taking a ride into the past and it is a measure of how things have changed in terms of health and safety, as Robert tells me that when (not if, I note) people were killed on the railways, the incentive was to keep the trains running, not shut the tracks down for health and safety investigations.

Finally, after hours of preparatory work and safety checks, Rocket is ready to roll. Up on the footplate, her pressure dials are rising and amongst the smoke and steam her whistle calls.

“Come on, beauty, come on,” Dave says to Rocket, easing various levers and little brass wheels and cajoling her into action.

He gives me a brief lesson in signalling protocol, shows me how to work the reverser, or gear stick, how to release the regulator to bring power, and crucially how to operate the brakes. Again, it’s a physical thing and more like a good workout. There’s no autopilot or power steering and, as the smoke belches out and more coal goes on the fire, I am instantly the colour of charcoal.

But I am also now the driver of a train, being watched by crowds who have gathered on the platform for Telford Steam Railway’s popular Santa Special and it is clear that although these giant mechanical dinosaurs are now extinct from most of the world’s railroads, steam technology lives on in people’s hearts.

Even though we are travelling at only a few miles an hour, feeling Rocket’s momentous power at my fingertips is an incredible experience, but harnessing that energy takes years of practice.

As Robert says: “You have to learn to listen to a steam engine – you can tell things just from the way she’s sounding.

“It’s 80 per cent experience and 20 per cent Mystic Meg – I have to be 10 minutes into the future to know what she needs.”

And suddenly I realise there is no better argument for having faith in short-term futures than when pulling levers and spinning wheels, all hot and bothered, and attempting to reign in the nature of a beast driven by earth, wind and fire.

Elements which, it just so happens, have another purpose too.

“Have you brought your sausages?” says Dave rather confusingly. Thinking it’s a trick played to test the mettle of rookie tradesmen – like asking a trainee decorator if he’s brought his stripey paint – I pretend not to hear.

Which is a move that backfires on me when Dave then produces a large pack of snorkers from his leather driver’s bag, along with several rashers of bacon and a box of eggs, cleans off the coal shovel with hot water from Rocket’s engine, and proceeds to lay out the raw ingredients of a full English right there on the spade.

It’s not a technique I’ve seen in a Jamie Oliver cook book but I as Robert tucks in later, he reassures me: “It tastes better with a bit of charcoal added in. Helps the digestion. It does mine, anyway.”

All of this washed down with tea from billy cans kept cosy on top of the firebox.

“The railways didn’t just run on steam,” adds Robert. “They ran on tea.”

This is an experience that focusses the mind in the moment. There is life and death in driving a steam train, for to misjudge riding such a living creature would be fatal – as I learn from my gravest mistake when, abeit it quite gently, I hit the buffers with a bang that throws me around the footplate like a buffoon.

But driving a steam engine is all about the journey, to which, because of its physical nature, the driver is inseparably connected.

To arrive is all good and well. But to travel? Well, there is only one way to do that.

* For more information about driver experience days visit www.telfordsteamrailway.co.uk/driving.php