LET me take you back 40 years to my f-f-f-freezing bedroom in Upper Stratton.

It’s dark, there is ice on the inside of the windows and pretty soon I will have to get up. In ten minutes, to be precise.

How do I know?

Because, through the freezing fog, from about three miles away, comes the sound – part whistle, part drone, part screech, part roar – of the Swindon Works hooter, telling me it is precisely 7.20am.

I have five more minutes until it blows again, which will be my final warning.

Then another five until it tells me to get out of bed.

Swindon effectively invented the snooze button.

For generations, stretching back more than a century, the hooter had been blowing, calling the town’s railwaymen (and latterly railwaywomen) to work.

For me the call was to school, not to work, as I never would go ‘inside’ - unlike my father, both grandfathers, and great-grandfathers before me.

But you didn’t actually have to work there for the hooter to be part of your life.

It was Swindon’s timekeeper, and my father, who died in 1977, could never have imagined a time when it would be silent.

But as we all know, it blew for the last time at 4.30pm on the day the Works closed - March 26, 1986.

This year sees the 30th anniversary of that black day (arguably the blackest) in Swindon’s history, and, in just over two months, the hooter will be heard again, to mark the occasion.

Actually, it’s not one hooter but two, always blown together, and they won’t be the originals, which are still in place above the Designer Outlet, but exact replicas, and the sound will be exactly the same as it was, all those years ago.

I know because, as a member of the steering group of Swindon 175, I was privileged and proud to be present when the man who made the replica, Colin Hatch, tested it, using steam from his own traction engine, as already reported in this paper.

I used my phone to video it, with sound, but I’m not really sure why – because I am not allowed to show it to anybody.

There is a strict embargo on the sound until it is blown again in March – and rightly so, because it is only proper that something produced to mark the anniversary of the closure isn’t heard until the correct moment, and in the presence of ex-railwaymen.

You won’t hear it until then, but I can tell you that it will not only have all the power of (and possibly a little bit more than) than the original, but, because of subtle adjustments made during the testing, it really will be just like the real thing.

The funny thing about the hooter is we could be excused for hating it.

You could argue it was a symbol of the enslavement of a vast workforce who lost money if they weren’t at work when it blew for the last time in the morning.

On the contrary, it came to symbolize a kind of unity among the town’s people, partly because, when the 5th Viscount Bolingbroke complained that the sound was unsettling his pheasants at Lydiard House and tried to stop it, Swindon’s railwaymen took it personally.

They all signed a petition, while the company’s lawyers argued in court to keep the hooter blowing.

So we came to love it, and we have loved it more than ever after that final blowing in 1986, when it seemed to symbolise Swindon’s glorious railway past and a future defiance.

So keep your ears open because the hooter is back - and it sounds great.