THE Cedar Court Grand Hotel opens next month, in the neo-Georgian premises built by the North Eastern Railway in 1906. This will be York’s first five-star hotel, which is good news for the city, and I hope to stay there myself if the right circumstances arise. (Basically, someone else will have to pay).

But I can’t help wishing that the building was still British Rail North Eastern Region HQ, as it had become in the Sixties and Seventies when my dad, John Martin, worked there. It was ‘Head Office’, and if my dad said something to you that you didn’t quite catch, and you were so remiss as to say, “Eh?” he would respond in tones of mock-outrage, “Eh? To me? Head office?”

I felt sorry for anyone whose father didn’t work in Head Office. No other job could be so secure, as suggested by the forbidding double doors, the grand staircase, the marble floors... and one of its floors housed something called Central Control, where, as I believed, the cleverest men in Yorkshire oversaw the operation of the railway network.

My dad worked in ‘finance’. I never quite knew what he did, but his occupation of a room in Head Office made us railway aristocrats in the premier railway city.

We all had first class rail passes. If I was bored, aged 14, I’d say to my dad, “I’m off to London”, and his only comment would be “Don’t lose your pass”.

I would take a first class compartment, kick off my trainers, and stretch out reading the NME. Indignant businessmen would poke their heads around the door, demanding, “Are you aware this is first class?” and I would nonchalantly flash my pass.

My dad, I noticed, never showed his pass to any ticket collectors. There was no need, since he knew them all. He also had privilege tickets for the London Underground and it seemed to me he knew all the staff on that as well, but that can’t be right.

I helped out backstage for the Railway Players; I played badminton in the Railway Institute Gymnasium, which was – and is – located in what was built as a vast loco erecting shop. (For years I used to wonder why a gymnasium required such an incredibly high ceiling, and clock with a six-foot diameter).

We went on holiday with the British Rail Touring Club, and the international significance of my father was apparently confirmed by the fact that we went first class on continental trains, too.

At home at Woodthorpe, I went to sleep listening to the musical clanking of the Dringhouses Marshalling Yard, whose nocturnal resonances gave rise to the railway dream world I have used as the background of a series of thrillers centred around York.

These are set in Edwardian times, but they owe a lot to the city of my boyhood. Back then, about 20,000 people in York worked on the railways, as opposed to 2,000 today. The station was surrounded by a network of lines, the intensity of the goods-shunting being signified by names such as ‘Banana Sidings.’ The smuts from the railway lands painted the whole city black: the Bar Walls were black; the Minster was black, and when I look at it today, I think “I know your guilty secret”, as when a friend has his teeth capped.

There was a railway museum in my day – somewhere down Queen Street. It was overseen by a retired railwayman who seemed to spend his entire life reading the Press (nothing wrong with that, mind you), and housed just two locomotives, so closely parked to the grubby walls that if you climbed on to the footplate of one of them, you’d scrape your anorak and get it filthy.

What I didn’t appreciate was that, by the 1980s, the whole city was becoming a museum insofar as its railways were concerned.

My dad took early retirement from BR in 1984, aged 56. But Cedar Court Grand will always be Head Office to him – and to me.

• Andrew Martin is the bestselling author of The Blackpool Highflier and a series of other York-based crime novels featuring Edwardian railway detective Jim Stringer. Andrew will be speaking at Waterstone’s bookshop, High Ousegate, at 6pm on Saturday, as part of the York Literature Festival.

Other York Literature Festival events include:

• Kate Atkinson in conversation with Roger Clark, today, 7pm, York St John University, De Grey Court Lecture Theatre, Lord Mayor’s Walk.

• Reading and signing session featuring Andrea Gillies, tomorrow 5pm, Unitarian Chapel, St Saviourgate. Andrea is the author of Keeper, a moving, humorous account of caring for her mother-in-law, who has Alzheimer’s Disease.

• Hands On Crime Fiction for Children – The Real Story! Sunday, 1.30pm to 3pm. Fulford Road Police Station. A chance for children aged seven to 11 to explore how crime fiction takes shape and to learn the results of the Crime Writing Competition run in conjunction with North Yorkshire Police.