papagolfjuliet

It's going for a contract overhaul somewhere in northern England. And as I understand it ownership of all of the stock has been transferred. I gather that Vesta and Hawarden and the Coal Tank are all now owned by the BLS.

Update: Haydock is going to the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, and Kettering Furnaces No.3 to the Waterford & Suir Valley Railway.

And there's another good reason for dispersing the collection: I know quite a few people around here who would never set foot in that hateful family's hateful house (whose gatehouse was designed to resemble that of Wormwood Scrubs as a constant reminder to Lord Penrhyn's employees and tenants of what would happen to them if they put a foot wrong) and so paradoxically have a better chance of seeing the locos now that they are no longer on display there.

I hold no brief for the NT - far from it - but to be fair on this occasion it should be noted that while Penrhyn was a nice little museum it was impossible to photograph or even get a decent view of most of the exhibits; the narrow confines of a stable block are hardly ideal for displaying standard gauge engines. The museum was also a hangover from a period in the 1960s when it was NT policy to concentrate collections of particular items at particular properties: railway equipment at Penrhyn, Harpsichords at Hatchlands Park, dolls' houses at Nunnington Hall, and so on. It was an odd policy at the time and it is also odd that the collections remained in situ for so long after the policy was abandoned.

Well, I wasn't speculating. Somebody connected with one of the new custodians told me so.

It's Hawarden, going to the Middleton Railway. Vesta is going to the East Lancs. I gather that ownership of the Coal Tank is being transferred to the Bahamas Locomotive Society. That leaves Haydock and Kettering Furnaces No.3 and Beckton No.1; one of these three is going to somewhere in Kent (Beckton No.1 to Chatham docks perhaps?). About a decade ago Haydock was due to move to Beamish but could not be removed from its corner of the building at Penrhyn. Perhaps that transfer will now go ahead?

Another Glasgow Empire classic: Roy Castle, having played multiple instruments to deafening silence, decides to try a tap dance. After he's finished somebody down below says "Jesus, is there no end tae his bloody versatility?"

Have just remembered that on one occasion when Mike and Bernie were playing the notorious Glasgow Empire, Bernie came on after Mike had already done a couple of jokes and a voice from the stalls said "Suffering Christ, there's two of them."

"People laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now." - Bob Monkhouse "Where would you be without laughter? Here." - Les Dawson

Mind you, we had worse Winters in the 60s: Mike and Bernie.

Plenty of railway footage in this Tonight Programme special from 1963 (the modern introduction by Chris Packham lasts a couple of minutes). Set designer: Ridley Scott.

He played James Hadleigh more or less straight after 'Adam Adamant LIves!' was axed in 1967, first in 'Gazette' in 1968 and then in 'Hadleigh' on and off from 1969 to 1976.

More 'Hadleigh': a brief glimpse of a 40 at speed, followed by a Deltic and an 03 at York. How Hadleigh manages to arrive from London on a southbound train is a mystery for the ages.

Marsh also converted some E4s into 2-4-2Ts, which presumably were not intended for autotrain use.

Have been reminded that DE March converted a couple of Terriers to 2-4-0Ts. Billinton quickly converted them back, so evidently whatever Marsh had been trying to do didn't work.

And there's more. Thanks to stock footage, in this episode of 'The Champions' two of our heroes manage to travel on the Talyllyn and the Ffestiniog at the same time.

More from Lew Grade's stable: Denham Golf Club Halt at the start of this episode of 'Man in a Suitcase.'

This episode of Brian Clemens' ATV anthology drama series 'Thriller' involves a series of murders on a Euston-Glasgow sleeper, which starts authentically enough with a rail blue 86 leaving London. The 86 then magically becomes an unidentified AC loco in 1960s electric blue, then as night falls transforms into some sort of European electric, and eventually reverts to being an 86 just in time to arrive at a 'Glasgow Central' which is in the middle of nowhere and has no OHL or overall roof.

I'm rather fond of the CONTAINS NUTS warnings on packets of... nuts.

Double headed blue Warships at 17' 20" in this newly-uploaded episode of 'Hadleigh.'

Is it still owned by the Dean Forest Diesel Association, and on loan to the NYMR, or has it been purchased outright?

I misspoke. The ownership of the grave remains with the church, but any memorial on that grave belongs to whoever put it there and to their heirs or, if the owner dies intestate, to that person's descendants. Only they can authorise the replacement or repair or amendment of a gravestone and only they can authorise further interments in that plot. As to the exhumation of a certain well known author, the unlikelihood or obtaining such an order has not prevented the Bronte Museum from trying to get Anne out of St. Mary's Scarborough over and over again for years.

Many middle aged blokes don't have much spare time, for the simple reason that people are having kids much later. In the early days of the railway preservation movement by the time a man was 45 or so his kids had got married and left home. Now like as not a middle aged couple's kids are still at primary school.

This is also the reason why vandalised gravestones are seldom repaired or righted - they are the property of the family of the deceased, and not of the church or local authority, meaning that they can't be touched without the permission of the family, so once a gravestone is knocked over it will probably stay knocked over because if as is usually the case you can't readily track down the descendants of the person whose grave has been vandalised then you can't readily repair it. There is one particular case of a Yorkshire church where the graveyard is the resting place of a famous author whose equally famous family are all buried in the grounds of a museum elsewhere, and whose grave is made of sandstone and faces out to sea with the result that it is badly eroded. There was a lengthy tussle between the church and the museum over ownership not only of the grave but also of the body, which the museum would very much like to exhume and place with the rest of the family as (not to put too fine a point on it) a monetisable tourist attraction, the current upshot of which is that the body is still in situ but the grave has two gravestones: the original eroded one standing upright, and a new one laid flat on the ground beneath it. Another case in point is the Royal Albert Hall. If you've ever watched concerts broadcast from there you'll have noticed that most of the boxes are always empty. This is because the Hall was funded by public subscription and the biggest subscribers got a box of their own in perpetuity, meaning that nobody except the descendants of that donor can use the things.

Back in the 90s - before the days of DBS checks - the Ffestiniog took somebody on who subsequently turned out to be a convicted child molester. They sacked him, naturally enough, and he sued them for unfair dismissal and won a sizeable sum of money. There's an element of self-protection in DBS checks even if the person being checked is unlikely to interact with children as part of the job.