A fisheye lens and a passing freight train made a trainspotter a fashion star
Luke Nicolson quit a Rolls-Royce engineering placement in 2021 because his trainspotting videos, filmed as Francis Bourgeois with a GoPro inches from his face, had exploded. Within a year he was picnicking beside railway lines with Joe Jonas, modelling for Gucci and The North Face, and by 2026 hosting The Grand Tour.
Born in the summer of 2000, Nicolson spent his early years in Harlesden, north-west London, as the son of an NHS worker and a photography teacher. Nobody else in the family cared about trains, but by three he was hooked on wooden BRIO sets, and after a trip to a model railway factory in Devon at four his grandmother bought him his first set. The family moved to Frome in Somerset around the time he was six, where freight from Whatley Quarry kept him watching. Mocked at school, he buried the hobby as a teenager.
COVID restrictions revived it. He began filming at a bridge outside Frome and, in 2020, posting to TikTok with his brother, starting with spoof celebrity chats. The pseudonym was a shield: Francis because he admires how France runs its railways, Bourgeois after a Louise Bourgeois sculpture show he saw with his father, not the 18th-century painter many assumed. His breakthrough came in October 2021, when a clip of him greeting a locomotive named Dick Mabbutt at Brighton drew more than 12 million views and another, in which he tumbles off a chair while waving at a driver, passed six million. He admits some moments, like the fall, are staged for absurd comedy.
Brands followed quickly. He became an ambassador for GB Railfreight, was the first passenger aboard a Class 345 train when Transport for London promoted the new Elizabeth line in May 2022, and starred in a Highsnobiety fashion film shot on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway that won best fashion film in Berlin. Channel 4 ran his series Trainspotting with Francis Bourgeois, and his book The Trainspotter's Notebook came out in October 2022.
He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham and once hoped to build or revive railway lines. His style mixes vintage railway gear with streetwear, and he can name a train model from its horn alone. By April 2026 he had over 3.3 million TikTok followers.
Source: Francis Bourgeois
