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

[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