Welcome as always to the Railwaymedia blog, which appears to have settled down to a monthly appearance, principally as a result of work patterns dictating when, or if, I get out and about.
That a few weeks would pass I predicted in the last edition along with the fact I might near the end of reprocessing the pictures already on the website. This I managed to accomplish; there's always more that can be done, especially to the older poorer quality images that need a lot of work to make them look reasonable, but at least the captioning has now been standardised and it is largely for now a case of scanning in some old pictures and, of course, occasionally taking some new ones.
At the moment of writing this there are two albums in the New Additions section containing those railway images from 1992 I managed to scan in over the last few weeks. A lot of my 6"x4" prints aren't really up to the quality for scanning in at high resolution and adding to the site, but there are still a few images, like those I took on a trip to an open day at the Booth's Scrapyard in Rotherham in February 1992 (50020 pictured above) that are well worth the effort to clean up.
With three weeks spent mainly scanning images I did then manage a few days out with my camera. I had intended to go to the Newcastle area for a few beers during January but a freight train derailment near Penrith on the day planned had (fortunately as it turned out given the weather) sent me for a day to Cambridgeshire instead. Again I was lucky with the sun for the day this month I chose to head to Tyneside, principally to visit a range of the areas Wetherspoons pubs I hadn't yet visited but also to get some more photographs of the unique Tyne and Wear Metro System.
I made the effort to get a shot I particularly wanted of the stunning Byker Viaduct. Just behind this 1979 built concrete structure can be glimpsed the rather more ornate Ouseburn Viaduct built in 1839 by John and Benjamin Green for the Newcastle and North Shields Railway and which is now part of the East Coast Main Line. The photo was taken from the third massive structure crossing the valley which carries the A193 road and itself dates from 1878, though since much widened.
I had a pleasant day working my way round the area including visiting for the first time in many years Whitley Bay and Monkseaton. These Metro stations are worth seeing, along with Tyne Dock, for their ornate North Eastern Railway station buildings and canopies. I also had a trip across the Tyne on the Shields Ferry between North and South Shields which, as it is run by Nexus the local transport organisation, the price is included in their all operator day ticket.
Despite having a few days out over the next week I couldn't work up the enthusiasm to take my camera with me so it was 8 days before a Grand Central HST heading down to Crewe for tyre turning gave me a reason to head out in the car for an hour or so. I can rarely be bothered to drive across Preston for just one picture but the HST fortunately coincided with a freight train and a Trans Pennine Desiro too so a trip up the A6 to Woodacre was worth making despite the weather.
As it was half-term for the children last week in our area I couldn't really go for any long days out but had arranged a nights stay in Edinburgh with the family. I took my camera in case daytime testing of the trams had reached Princes Street. Apparently they started the afternoon we headed back! Whilst my first love as a child was always railways, regular readers will also know that I have had an interest, and worked on, buses too. I have about 800 bus pictures from the 1990's I have yet to scan in, plus captioning and reprocessing work on those I have already done, but only occasionally do I take pictures of modern vehicles. With nice weather and the rest of the family wanting to look round shops I took the opportunity to get some pictures of the always immaculate Lothian Buses fleet.
Usually on a Saturday, having been working Friday night, I don't tend to get up until dinner time but being awake early and with a friend heading up on the train to Glasgow I decided to have a ride up to Carlisle for an hour before returning to my regular Saturday afternoon pub.
What really swung it for this trip was that the regular Cumbrian Mountain Express from London to Carlisle was running and it enabled me to get shots at both Preston and Carlisle, though inevitably just end-of-the-platform pictures. The sun was out in Preston which made the shot of 86259 arriving there problematic. The train changes to steam traction at Carnforth enabling you to get ahead of it and a bank of cloud cover as it arrived in Carlisle actually enabled a better south-facing shot.
For those who don't like buses please look away from that day's trip pictures too as I took some more bus pictures on my return to Preston. I'm not sure that I will be starting to regularly take photos of them but I found it quite pleasing to get some shots of local buses purely as a record. Maybe once I get back into the scanning of my old bus pictures this will further awaken my interest but I'm not as yet planning on standing too much on too many street corners for the time being at least!
Thanks as always for reading, please check the New Additions section for not just any recent trips I've been on but also for progress with my scanning of the remainder of my railway pictures.
We went for a family meal at an Italian Restaurant on Leith Walk in Edinburgh during our trip there. I was suprised to see this obvious railway reference on the frame of a T-shirt hanging on the wall. 65A used to be the code for Eastfield depot in Glasgow; bye for now.
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