STEPHEN Gould had already endured two tours of Northern Ireland during the height of the troubles when he decided to return to civilian life as member of the British Transport Police.

It was 1980, and while Mr Gould didn’t expect a quiet life in BTP, based in London, he hoped it would be less stressful than the four-and-a-half years he had spent as a Royal Artillery Gunner.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Over the course of the next ten years he receivedabevy of bravery awards for the hair-raising scrapes he got into.

In 1981 Mr Gould and another BTP officer risked their lives to clear a rail tunnel.

Two disgruntled rail employees left a pile of logs on the rail in the tunnel at the rear of Euston Station. There was no time to halt the trains hurtling towards the tunnel when Mr Gould and fellow officer George Moore dashed into it to remove the obstacles that would have almost certainly derailed a train.

Mr Gould, of North Avenue, Southend said: “The two men had been sacked by British Rail so they decided to take revenge. They put 21 saplings on the track. There was no time to clear the line so me and a colleague went in to clear it.”

Mr Gould and his colleague received an award for their bravery and “good work”.

Four years later in 1985 Mr Gould ended up with 12 stitches after intervening in a fight between Chelsea and West Ham football hooligans at Parsons Green Station. For that he received an award for “bravery and devotion to duty”.

In 1988 he was given a Royal Humane Society Award for the attempted rescue of a man who had jumped on a track and been run over by a train.

He said: “Someone jumped under a train in attempt to kill himself at East Ham Station. He was trapped under the train so me and an ambulance man crawled under the train to release him.

“They had to jack the train up with us underneath. They pulled him out then lowered the train back down and drove it over us.

“We had to lay very flat and still as the tracks carried a 630 volt current.

Though we got him out alive, the man later died in hospital”

There followedaspell in 1990 as a bomb car driver which was able to XRay unattended items. As part of the Special Response Unit at a time of heightened IRA activity, he would be called to deal with suspicious packages and “white powder incidents”.

It was then a vacancy for a dog handler came up. Mr Gould could have been forgiven for thinking he might actually be safer in this role, but he later trained to be a bomb dog handler and some of the most traumatic events of his life were to follow.

He said: “You had to be an experienced dog handler to become a bomb dog handler. My first dog was a German Shepherd called Max. He was a big hairy thing and lazy. At football matches the other dogs would be jumping about barking but he’d just go to sleep. Woe betide you if you woke him though. I had him for two