Blimey it’s like a real railway line! Second blog of the weekend and approaching the Racecourse Station on a Monday morning – albeit a Bank Holiday and a Festival Weekend – one does not expect to see the car park 2/3 full with overflow already in use at 0830! And it wasn’t just spotters in evidence there were passengers wanting to use trains – lots and lots of them. And it’s been like that (or worse/better) all weekend. I won’t overdo the negatives (noticeable queues and frazzled volunteers) but the positives are that, for much of the day, there’ll be another train along (fairly) shortly and, what’s more there was plenty to see and do when not actually getting on or off the train.
Oliver Cromwell – in black naturally!
Not least the fact that all the trains I saw this morning were executing a stately dance up and down the platforms, through the points and back. Now I am not aware whether this was intentional to provide the punters with lots of footage of steaming in progress, or was some delicate manoeuvring required by the complex timetable. All I can say is that, at times, it looked rather like me trying to reverse into a parking space!
With all this going on it wasn’t the day for intrusive maintenance activities but I engaged briefly in what my good colleagues John Leeson refers to as the ‘extreme sport’ of stump removal. Here’s this mornings haul:
Tough work but cheaper than gym membership
Elsewhere the garedens looked very fine – benefitting from the weekend’s rainstorms and here’s a composite of the Platform 2 gardens:
Equally impressive are the views of Mary’s work on Platform 1 gardens now that we’ve managed to unlock the photos (it was an IT issue – so we had to find a suitably qualified 7 year old to tell us how to do it!).
However if that’s the flora then the fauna is coming along too:
Here’s the inhabitants of the ‘des res’ (see blogs passim) which I managed to swiftly snap without disturbing mum and dad.
However, since it was a train festival here’s some more engines:
And as a special treat:
Yours, exhausted just from writing the blog!
Tim
