phil_sutters

My that was a long time between trains! I expect the rail-replacement buses weren't shiny enough to record.

The S&DJR's Bristol Channel ferry service used paddle steamers. It was never a huge success despite its high aspirations. Sherbro was the final ship in the passenger fleet and only lasted four years - the Severn Tunnel being the final nail in the coffin.

I never saw them on the street - too busy working a few streets away - but New Cross suffered from zombies in day light - scenes from Shaun of the Dead were filmed in a disused pub there

Some times they are too shiny - for good photography - when you are on the wrong platform when something rolls in unexpectedly! A better shot of a shiny loco or train perhaps this time.

Here's a lowly 313 spruced up - originally 313001, the UK’s first-ever second-generation electric multiple unit, it worked out of Moorgate. It now runs on Southern's Coastway services as 313201. more shiny please

A fair amount of shiny brass here more shiny please

I thought Volk's Electric Railway was opened using a 50 volt supply in 1883. That was increased to 160 volt a year or so later. Eighty years later Dad took a photo!

" I suspect not. My usual solution to anything to big for CA - so far, live-stock market, gas works, maltings, egg depot, and Great Yarmouth Drill Hall - is to place it at Achingham, however, a bandstand might be pushing my luck. There would certainly be such a bandstand at the elegant seaside resort of Birchoverham Next The Sea, which, in order to justify the volume of through traffic to the West Norfolk, is becoming in my imagination something more of the grandeur of Victorian Cromer, than Wells." Can't do you Cromer, but Yarmouth & Gorleston had contrasting styles

Unusual for that lot to retain a more elegant turn of phrase - our engine shed is a bit down-market and m.p.d. is a bit long-winded in full.

From a rapidly falling apart Gazetteer, dated by my Father, from his knowledge of railway development, to c1884. It is a strange collection of maps. The English Counties are all there, Wales appears to have been pinched, probably by one of my Welsh relatives. Scotland and Ireland are both to a smaller scale. Some important cities like York and Portsmouth don't appear, but the resorts of Hastings, Tunbridge Wells and Cheltenham do. You might say Portsmouth had strategic importance and was omitted on security grounds, but Chatham and Plymouth both appear. Odd! (Don't forget that you can get a larger version by clicking on the map)

I can find nothing specifically about signalling in any of my S&D books. The nearest I can find are from loco crew accounts in Peter Smith's 'Mendips Engineman' and 'Footplate over the Mendips'.but they don't seem to refer to specific regulations.

Keep it shiny!

I came across one similarly unfazed by people passing by on the driveway that leads to the Eastbourne Miniature Railway. It seemed to be on quite good terms with a swan There was also a far from cooperative Green Woodpecker that kept on crossing the driveway, but never settled on a tree that was near enough to photograph.

This depiction of an'unmarked patrol' has struck me as a bit quaint for sometime, but I have only just got round to braving the traffic on the A259, coast road, to get a snap of it.

When we lived in Coleford, on Mendip, the last bus from Bath arrived at about 9.55pm. The street lights went out at 10pm. So halfway between the bus stop and the vicarage, one was suddenly plunged into darkness, usually as one passed Gertie Hancock's slaughter house. She was the butcher. Her sister, Flo, kept the accounts - using the compulsory but otherwise unused fridge to keep the ledgers in.

I know that I have used this photo before, maybe even in this collection of lightly knotted threads - it can't be called a single thread - but it is relevant to this meander. It is clearly a motor-bicycle.

Steam at Sheffield Park - taken by my eldest grandson.

I only remember going on a proper motorbike once. I used ride my dad's moped and Vespa along our country vicarage drive, but only went on a former school friend's bike once. I remember it for two reasons. It had a silencer made with two pressed steel plates for the outer casing. Sitting on the pillion, with my hands holding on under the seat, the bike back-fired and the rivets popped out and a load of muck that had been between the plates blew out and across my right knuckles. We had earlier been out to a local farm and bought a couple of decidedly cloudy, large bottles of scrumpy, which I held on my lap on the way home. This was in the 1960s - no crash helmets then.

There's more - Lizzie is my Great-Grandmother

My great-great aunt Marjory did!

I have just noticed how high the tender is stacked!

I don't know whether it helps, but I have increased the density of this photo to try to make the details clearer.

Edward Thomas 28.7.1966

Here's a nice blast of steam in one of Dad's earlier photos