Steam!

[ffutures]

Just heard a loud chuffing noise outside and looked out to see a steam train heading towards Paddington Station. According to this site it's the "Yuletide Bard Express" running a couple of hours late.

Couldn't see much of the engine, they run steam trains along the track nearest my house to avoid power lines, and that unfortunately means that most of it is concealed by the brick wall between the road and the railway, but the web site says it should be the GWR King Class 4-6-0 no 6024 King Edward I - but given that they seem to have rescheduled the run and the station it runs to it's possible that they changed the engine too. If it is that engine, here's a picture:



What I saw of it was consistent with this, but I can't be sure.

It's funny... when there were twenty or thirty steam trains an hour running along here I'd imagine that my parents etc. thought of them as bloody nuisances, covering everything with soot and grime. These days they're romantic...

Later: I've copied the picture, saved it to photobucket and linked to that. Apologies if you couldn't see it before.

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Um. Getting the "direct linking not allowed" banner. I suspect you want to get folk to cut and paste http://images.fotopic.net/?iid=ybvl15&outx=600&quality=70 into a new window....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've saved it to Photobucket and linked to that, should be OK now.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

No, they were always romantic. Some people just didn't spot it at the time...

[captboulanger.livejournal.com]

I'm a big trains fan myself... though unfortunately they don't even run trains on the tracks near my house anymore, as they were washed out and never replaced on the mountainside about 40 miles to the east about 30 years ago, turning our line into a dead end.

There's still one of those steel-sided box bridges with the local line's logo painted on one side - the San Diego and Arizona Eastern. A little further north there's the usual Santa Fe and Souithern Pacific signs left, though nowadays it's Burlington Northern-Santa Fe (since a merger)....

If we had operational tracks, I might even look into exactly what it takes to play trainspotting.

[captboulanger.livejournal.com]

P.S. a good book about my area and trains, if you can find it, is a 1999 volume by David Haward Bain called "Empire Express" (published by Penguin).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that the novelty wears off if you live next to busy lines - it takes something unusual, like the noise of a steam engine, to remind me that there's even a railway there, despite the fact that a train goes by every minute or so at peak times. If you look at the satellite view you'll see what I mean - there are six main railway lines there plus two underground (subway) lines that run on the surface at this point. I'm on the street adjoining the line to the south.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.519345,-0.191145&spn=0.004389,0.008664&t=k&hl=en