Blackpool Steam and Transport Day 1991

In October 1991 Blackpool put on a steam and transport rally and rounded off the experience with an old-fashioned fairground, with the rides being powered by steam showmen's engines.

Blackpool Airport was the venue. It hosted a number of this type of events during the 1980s and very early nineties - though I think this may have been the penultimate one with 1992 being the last one before the airport started to expand its operations.

I'm just old enough to remember steam rollers being used to compact and smooth tarmac on the roads. Real tar too - on hot days you would find the road melting and sticky lumps of tar stuck to the bottom of your shoes. On such days you had to take your shoes off at the back door when you came in the house or risk your mother's wrath as you ruined the carpet! Small boys of course couldn't resist it... We used to poke at tar by the kerbside with a pencil until we could work a lump free and then it went - along with bits of string, a penknife and perhaps a white mouse - in the pocket!

Penknives, I hasten to add, were used for sharpening pencils in the innocent days of my boyhood. Using a knife you could sharpen a pencil lead into either a point or a squared-off oblong. Lost skills...

A Foden steam lorry. These were often dangerously quiet. Once the lorry had accelerated and the steam was shut off, the only sound they gave was the occasional clanking of the chain drive.

A final look at the fairground. In the background to the right is an old-fashioned "haunted swing" sideshow where people sit on a "swing" which is fixed and then the "room" about them rotates throught 360 degrees to make you feel as though you are tipping out of the seat. The room in this case was rotated by hand, the chap who took the money, once he had enough customers, shut the door, went to the back of the set and heaved to turn the wooden room.

There were a number of cars on display too and the British Leyland-built Pope-Mobile that had been built for the Pope's visit in 1982.

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