Carnforth Steamtown Locomotive Shed, 1981

One for the steam railway enthusiasts. I'm still scanning old photos and in this article we're back to black and white and a day out to the excellent steam railway museum at Carnforth just north of Lancaster and Morecambe. Lots of photos and little text (stop that cheering!) because I'm no expert about railway stuff. The date was Wednesday 25 February 1981. Enjoy, but just as a reminder please read the copyright notice in the left hand column.

There were a number of famous locomotives housed at Carnforth including Sir Nigel Gresley (above), The Flying Sctotsman, Lord Nelson and a locomotive that some twenty years later would be painted red and pull the Hogwarts Express...

On a Wednesday in February there are no engines to be found working. We wandered round the engine sheds, almost without seeing anyone else!

The collection had locomotives in all conditions but not much room to step back to admire them!

A nice reminder of a day over 35 years ago to look at machines from 70 or more years ago!

A Steam Railway and Jamaica Inn

Tuesday 15 September 2015. We set off after breakfast for Bodmin & Wenford Railway, a steam railway operating out of Bodmin. We got there slightly before opening time and were joined by another couple from our B&B who had also decided to do the train today.

We went for a cuppa in the station buffet whilst we waited for the ticket office to open and then bought tickets and headed onto the platform to watch the preparations for our journey. It wasn't a totally promising day as you can tell from the damp on the platform and the sky, but just at this point it decided to be sunny for a while.

Our loco was a Great Western Railway 2-8-0 tender locomotive, No.4247. Built in 1916 this was one of many such in its class designed to pull coal trains from South Wales mines to the ports. They had to be "strong" for such work and were built with large boilers and limited water tank capacity. The lines between mine and port were equipped with water supply points in abundance to make up for the narrow side tanks.

4247 also had a spell hauling china clay in Cornwall. It was withdrawn from service in the 1960s and was recovered from the Barry scrapyard around 20 years later. (Source: Bodmin & Wenford Railway website)

The Bodmin station is nicely maintained too with little touches like this railway advert for Weston-Super-Mare. Nearby was the disintegrating but interesting remains of a corrugated iron nissan hut containing a bench with a hole...

There's a toot from the whistle - it's time to get into the carriages! We join Carl and Sandra in a compartment on a corridor carriage and take our seats. The train sets off from the mid point on its route. So we will travel first to Boscarne Junction where the locomotive will swap to the other end and take us back to Bodmin General. Then after a short wait it will go the other way to Bodmin Parkway and back again to complete the journey.

About halfway to Boscarne Junction the train comes out of a cutting and I spot a female red deer racing up a field away from the sudden apparition of this noisy, smelly thing puffing smoke out of its funnel. As the ticket collector checks our tickets we go through a dark tunnel and she says afterwards "Sometimes I nip to the next compartment in the dark and then when we come out of the tunnel I'm standing there and they all jump!"

The end of our journey. We arrive back at Bodmin General for the second time and take a few last photos before moving on.

We have several hours to pass before our booking at Jamaica Inn so we head west from Bodmin towards Padstow. It's a nice drive, but on reaching Padstow we find the car parks full to bursting. The road ends at one of them and there is no choice but to turn into it where we immediately join a queue of cars who are waiting for spaces. These will never materialise because the cars trying to exit are blocked by this same queue... It takes 20 minutes to get from the car park entrance to the exit - approx 60 yards distance. We retrace our steps and go for some lunch in the middle of nowhere at a large garden centre. The photo of Padstow (taken on a similarly wet day) was taken in 1992.

We headed back to Bodmin and to the Jamaica Inn where we had a table booked for 6 o'clock. By the time we got there it was about four and was pelting down with rain. I left the camera in the car once again and this time my photo is from 1996. We parked and dashed into the gift shop and then I dashed back again to deposit our bought goodies in the boot and picked up my sketch pad.

This is the main bar and is from a letter card that was bought on a previous visit. We bought drinks and settled onto the bench to the right of the fireplace and I sketched the room, trying to convey it as it might have appeared in the smuggling days of yore. I'm not totally sure when the Days of Yore were, come to think of it. Further back I think than Back in The Day (a phrase I hate) but perhaps not as far back as In Days of Old...

Anyway this is the result. I went wrong straight away with the angle of the beam and it was hard to work back from that. I should have whizzed it and started again really...

This is a bit better - I did this one yesterday especially for this blog and again ignored some of the outbuildings in an attempt to show an earlier version of the Jamaica Inn. It was indeed the haunt of smugglers and wreckers - those who shone false lights far inland but visible from the sea so that sailors thought themselves well away from the rocks of the shore. Daphne Du Maurier lived here for a while and wrote her famous book Jamaica Inn around the smuggling activities, but her inn does not take guests as it did in real life, but was merely a tavern with a storage facility. The inn, which dates from 1750, was also owned for a while by author Alistair MacLean.

But my favourite memory of the inn has to be of the parrot that used to reside in the bar in a large cage. In 1989 we were down in Cornwall as part of a large family party - my parents, the three of us, my brother and his son and my uncle. My uncle in particular was sitting next to the cage and had tried all evening to get the parrot to talk. It was having none of it. It would look at him and occasionally would screech but in the way of actual words it was totally the opposite of Shakespeare...

At the end of our visit, we got up and walked out one by one. Miss Franny and I brought up the rear and my uncle was in front of us. As he passed the cage he said "Come on... are you not going to speak to me?" In a perfectly understandable and loud voice it said quite distinctly "**** off!" His expression was priceless...

Cornwall Holiday Index

North Norfolk Railway

Monday 1 October. We'd seen aeroplanes, we'd seen trolleybuses. We had even seen trams. So in the midst of the Norfolk Broads, what form of transport have we still to see? Right! Steam trains!

We drove to Sheringham along the Norfolk coast and by the time we got to the lovely little station we were a bit late to catch the train we wanted to catch. However by lucky chance they had been having a small technical hitch and we arrived in time to dash onto the train literally seconds before it went!

We wandered through a couple of carriages and came to an old one with compartments and a corridor - very Harry Potter! We settled ourselves down and waited patiently for the witch with the sweets trolley. When she came she looked just like a male ticket inspector who, when asked where the chocolate frogs were, obviously thought he had misheard and ignored the question altogether... Not an HP fan then...

This was another place where the area's retired folks were having the time of their lives! Why are they all in Norfolk, these places? Pensioners really have it made down there! I think I'm going to have to move there. They were driving steam trains for Heaven's sake!!! One was selling souvenir booklets and popped his head into our compartment every ten minutes to say "Have I seen you before?" On receiving the nod, he'd say cheerfully, "Ah well, I'll leave you alone next time then!" Ten minutes later he'd pop his head round the door and say "Have I seen you before?"

The track runs ten miles from Sheringham to Holt with a stop at Weybourne along the way. At either end the locomotive has to be decoupled and then runs to some points and then trundles past the train of coaches to couple onto the other end to draw the train back again.

At these points we all jump off and take lots of photos of superheated water shooting out of safety valves and generally get in each other's way before jumping back onto the train once the locomotive is ready.

A group of children dressed as wartime refugees with little square boxes for a gas mask have got off at Holt and lined up. The teacher is dividing them up into three groups. "In line I want you to count to three," he says. Dutifully the first child shouts "One!", the second shouts "Two!", the third shouts "Three!" and the fourth shouts "One!" to start the sequence again. By the time it gets to child twenty the system has fallen down and another teacher is saying crossly to him "You haven't the foggiest idea of what you are supposed to be doing have you?" Upon which he turns a bewildered face to his equally bewildered neighbours who all shrug their shoulders and look mutinous along with him.

It takes around 40 minutes to do the ten miles and switch the locomotive to the other end so a full return journey takes an hour and a half. Back at Sheringham we get off the train and decide to go and find something to eat in the town. Sheringham looks extremely pretty so we decide that we will have another ride on the train (as our ticket lasts all day) and then will have a walk through the town later in the day.

We find a cafe at the end of the street and have a toastie and a coke (the drink that is... I was never a one for chemical pleasures... I did get confused once and snort a line of Pepsi...)

When we got back to the station a huge chunk of locomotive called Ayrshire Yeomanry (No.45156 for the enthusiasts) was swapping ends of a single coach which was filled with excited men and somewhat resigned but determined women.

The men had all paid around £400 for a day's footplate experience. Each of them got to drive the locomotive for the full ten mile stretch of track under the close supervision of a Norfolk pensioner who knew what he was doing. And more importantly knew what they might do before they actually did it, so that he could warn them about it before they smashed through the level crossing gates and gouged two deep lines across the main road...

The journey was remarkably similar to the one we did in the morning, but was no less enjoyable for that. We sat in the very same compartment and found a packet of tissues that must have fallen out of my pocket in the morning's excitement. Whilst we had lunch those tissues went on a 20 mile journey without us but now we were happily reunited!

We waved to the old chap in his conservatory at the back of his house, jutting into a garden that bordered the railway line. We watched as the windmill went by on the horizon and at Holt when we got off the train I looked at the small museum and the model railway for ten minutes whilst the locomotive did its swap-ends thing.

Then we sat in our compartment again and watched the crocodile of wartime refugees make their way back to the train. I think most of them had survived the war...

The sweets trolley never came round though...

Return to Norfolk Transport Weekend index page

Bristol Temple Meads

The other day I had to go to Bristol for a work meeting and took the train. It's a fair chug down from Blackpool to Bristol, involving changes at Preston and Birmingham New Street.

As I got off the train onto the platform at Bristol Temple Meads I thought my luck was in and that a steam train was in the station. It turned out to be a static display of old coaches bearing adverts for the Dartmouth Steam Railway in Devon. This used to be known as the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway so what Paignton have done to be so ignobly dropped from the name I'm not sure - the train still starts from there.

Bristol Temple Meads has an interesting history, being the original western terminus of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway (GWR). The original station has changed a lot, being expanded twice and having extra platforms slotted in when the broad gauge (7 feet and a quarter inch) track originally used by Brunel was converted to standard gauge of four feet eight and a half inches.

It has platforms numbered from 1-15. Passenger trains do not use platform two and platform 14 does not exist. Some of the signage refers to an older platform numbering system. Altogether my sort of station!

Temple Meads refers to a nearby church built originally by the Knights Templars and "Meads" being an old word for meadow - the area around the station was meadow at the time of building.

Large version of the photo: temple meads