July 1980 photos

[Blenheim]

Something I've been intending to do since the days of RMweb 3.0... I have created a small album of photos of railway-related material that I took while visiting England in July 1980. As it is but six months to go before their 30th anniversary, I thought RMweb readers might find them interesting. The problem is, the album lists the images by filename only at present, which is not very informative. I need to see if I can fix this. Also how to link to the album from here!

 

First photo in album

 

 

In autumn 1979, my father gave me his old Agfa Paxette 35 mm camera. It hadn't been used since the late 1960s. Focussing was a matter of estimating the distance to the subject and setting the focussing ring accordingly! Exposure relied on an inexpensive Japanese hand-held light meter -- I had to set the shutter speed and aperture manually as well. Still, it was my first full-frame 35 mm camera and I learnt the basics of photography on it. At times, it could produce some very good images. Most of those in my 1980 album are quite poor: blurred, out of focus, and/or incorrectly exposed. But I was there and captured the image: scenes like the remains of Abingdon station are long gone. My memory of the weather from July 1980 was that it was disappointing, which is borne out by the photos. Mostly it was grey and overcast. Photographic locations were London Kings Cross, London St Pancras, Canterbury West?, Stoke, London Euston and Abingdon, Oxon. I knew that the Deltics didn't have much time left, hence the heavy coverage!