Riding Shropshire's randomest railway

We took a trip to Bridgnorth, and as is tradition when taking a trip to Bridgnorth, we took a ride on the cliff railway.

Not gonna lie, I love this quirky Victorian mechanical survivor. It connected the 'high town' at the top of the cliff with the 'low town' river wharfs by the bridge with it's funicular runway. 

It's unique in being the only inland cliff railway in Britain. It's also the steepest incline of any British cliff railway. A real niche one of a kind gem tucked away in a back street in Bridgnorth.

You get a view too!

Monthly round up - December 2024

Happy New Year! What better way to welcome 2025 than a long post about the last month of 2024?

Our Christmas decorating was delayed because we were getting a new floor and carpentry work done in our hall for the first week or so. However, we were able to welcome 'the Boys' who were dressed up ready for Christmas! 

Rather than add to the semi-permenent upheaval of stuff everywhere due to the building work, we decided not to bring the tree and decorations down. Instead, we bought a small rainbow tree to brighten up the front room.

The branches soon filled up with decorations.

Work was busy in the run up to the Christmas break, including travelling to London, Bristol and Port Talbot. In London I posed with a film star at the station.

I also saw this Lego model of the new station that is effectively going to replace Paddington station when the HS2 project is completed. (The model had 14,000 pieces.)

Meanwhile, in Bristol, two famous people associated with the city had left their marks on the pavement.

The best part of Christmas is meeting up with people. We had a great afternoon in Tewkesbury with Mary and Steve. (Selfie outside the Abbey where we saw 'The Longest Yarn'.)

Between Christmas and New Year I met up with Connor briefly in Birmingham. We got to pose with Ozzy the Bull.

We also had a great time spending nearly a week with family. Cathy's sister was in town just before Christmas and my sister drove down from Edinburgh for the day on the day after Boxing Day!

The December weather (including Storm Darragh) interrupted the football. However, I set a new record for going to games in December - managing six. There were three before Christmas and three afterwards.

I saw Barry play twice before Christmas - a cup semi-final defeat to TNS and a come-from-behind league victory over Cardiff Met. My other pre-Christmas game was watching Caldicot Town just round the corner from my house when they played Canton.  My friend Ben, who plays for Caldicot, had just become a dad for the first time so it was nice to see him and say congrats. 

I also got a Futbology badge when I checked in at the Caldicot game as it was the 10th time I'd seen them.

The games after Christmas were two Shrewsbury home games, on Boxing Day and the 29th December, and Barry's game away at Briton Ferry on New Year's Eve. On Boxing Day, Shrewsbury battled to a win against Lincoln in murky midwinter mist. On the 29th, they drew against Northampton (in much milder weather). I've now seen four Shrewsbury home games this season and they haven't lost any. 

And so to my final game of 2024, which ended 0-0. This was my first scoreless game of the season and ended a run of 49 games since my last goalless game back in March. 

Here's how my season stats look at the end of December:

And that, as they say is that. We had a quiet New Year's Eve, building Lego, watching comedy on Netflix, and then it was midnight and 2024 was done!

Book of the Month - British Rail

After several months reviewing fiction, here's something a bit different. 

British Rail by Christian Wolmar sets out an alternative view of the state-owned rail network in Britain - away from the jokes about sandwiches and the wrong kind of snow. His argument is that this portrayal of costly ineptitude is underserved and was deliberately created to justify the privatisation of the railways, which has in fact ended up costing the taxpayer more while charging more for tickets on a worse service.

I was half expecting this to be a nostalgic look back to the good old days on the railways, but actually there is little nostalgia for the steam age or the pre-Beeching era. Beeching was the civil servant whose name is synonymous with railway closures, especially many rural branchlines. But Christian gives him a fair assessment - many of those lines were in disrepair and no longer served any industries or centres of population. Many of them hadn't turned a profit before being nationalised and actually 'British Rail' extended their lives longer than they would have lasted if run commercially. 

There are some fascinating insights in this book. In the 1950s British Railways had an ambitious plan to build helipads at major stations because helicopters were the transport of the future. But it's not just flights of fancy like that - there are plenty of actual railway practices that seem hilariously wrong-headed now.

One of those was the use of slip coaches. Basically, this was a system that meant fast trains didn't have to slow down at stations. At a given point, the last coach on the train would be uncoupled and roll to a halt in the station while the train thundered on. This meant that lots more staff were needed, one for each coach to apply the brakes and make sure it stopped in the right place. And the coaches needed to be collected up and shunted somewhere else until they were used again. It was crazily inefficient just to shave a few minutes off the time it took for a train to get to its eventual destination. 

The other thing I found interesting is that although Beeching's plans were made under a Tory government, the cuts were almost all carried out under a Labour administration. That's despite the opposition of unions to the cuts and lay-offs.

Most of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s were in the name of modernisation, but actually real modernisation didn't happen until a new generation of managers came through the system in the 1970s and 80s. Power shifted in favour of managers and away from engineers meaning that priority was given to joining up timetables and improving the experience of train travel. There were even marketing campaigns - many of which triggered memories of seeing the TV ads in the 80s. (Like "Let the Train Take the Strain.")

The real big shift was away from regionalised thinking - the country was basically split into four competing regions that mirrored the original four companies that were merged into British Railways. Instead of region-based organisation, the bosses at British Rail decided to focus on 'sectors' - passenger, freight, post and so on. The InterCity brand that I really remember from my childhood came in around then - along with Regional Railways which I remember seeing a lot more on trains operating out of my home town. 

I was very interested in the way focusing on the service being delivered, rather than the region services were being delivered in, transformed the railways. Some sectors started turning a profit, which was invested back into new trains, creating a virtuous circle of profit generation. A lot of this happened under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, which is surprisingly depicted as broadly supportive of British Rail and less inclined to meddle with the railways than previous governments.

But, sadly, then came privatisation. Christian presents this as a gross act of political vandalism, implemented entirely, and incompetently, for ideological reasons. It was a loose statement in John Major's manifesto in 1992, enacted without any real plan or sense of purpose by his unpopular government. The epilogue about the quarter century post-privatisation is a panoply of failures.

I think the highest credit I can give this book is that it's a book about railways that's ideal for people who don't get excited about railways as much as for people who do. There are lots of interesting tidbits of information - like the sheer number of steam engines built by British Rail that all ended up on the scrapheap by 1970 - and the overall story of a state owned industry achieving success is a compelling narrative. 

Secret coded railway logo

I spotted this artwork on the wall of a hotel bar in Manchester when I was up there at the end of September. Just an ordinary picture of a train, you might think...

But that logo is the logo that Lego use on their trains! 

See...

Welsh railwayana on the Severn Valley Railway

In my previous post about our visit to the Severn Valley Railway, I mentioned the Barry Railway Company coach that needed a good refurb.

However, in the little museum in Kidderminster there was a room chock-full of other Welsh 'railwayana' - name plates and notices and devices and other odds and ends. I went round taking photos of some items that had been gathered from Wales, mainly from across the South. 

First up, some signs. I don't think there was a railway station on the top of the Sugar Loaf - more likely this was to tell engine drivers they had reached the top of a long climb up the hill. Meanwhile, Pontarddulais is missing a d in the signal box sign underneath, a relic from when Welsh names were anglicised on official signs. 

There was another signal box sign from a long-vanished location below the impressive array of finials that would have been on top of signal posts.

And I was naturally massively excited to see this sign for Grangetown station!

Some signs were more than just names. There is a huge amount of detail in these safety notices from the Barry Railway and the Rhymney Railway.

This no trespassing notice was cast in metal for the Rhondda and Swansea Bay Railway Company. 

I'm not sure what this key was used for. I'd guess it's something to do with signalling. If you know, feel free to add a comment.

This poster for excursions to Barry Island captures a moment when a seaside trip was a proper outing and people would travel all the way from Cardiff and Newport.

There were also several mementoes taken off steam engines that were sent for scrap long ago. I imagine Nora worked around the mines in Blaenavon.

All the little railway companies in South Wales were absorbed into the Great Western Railway, which in turn became part of British Railways after nationalisation in 1948. This box on the way into the museum probably dates from the 1950s.

You can see evidence for long-gone railways across South Wales, with bridge-walls and even some extant viaducts visible on almost any car journey. But many railway sites have disappeared without leaving much of a trace, just occasional relics like these that were salvaged and put on display.

Review of 2020 - new films

I watched 41 films for the first time in 2020, but only seven of them were actually new releases. I saw three in cinemas before they closed under lockdown rules in March, and I saw another five new releases on Netflix and Disney Plus. So this isn't going to be a long post at all.

Even though we only went to the cinema three times, Cathy and I did get to meet a film star. 

The eight films were (in order):

• 1917
• JoJo Rabbit
• A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
• Onward
• Enola Holmes
• Mulan
• Soul
• The Midnight Sky

1917 was a very well-made first world war film where the central conceit was that it was filmed as if it was a continuous shot. Although there were a few 'fade to black' moments. I thought it started really well, with the panning shots down trenches, but a bit like the central protagonists who got sent to deliver a message, it got lost a little bit along the way. It captured that sense of danger, especially in the quiet bits not knowing when or if a shot or bomb would come out of nowhere. I would say it was worth watching, but I wouldn't want to watch it again.

JoJo Rabbit was a second world war film that tried to be three films in one - a film about the Nazification of children by the Hitler Youth, a film about Germans resisting the Nazi regime, and a film about Jews in hiding from the Gestapo. The second theme was the one least served by the script. There were some very clever touches throughout the film, which focused mainly on the little boy, JoJo, and his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler. 

I was uncomfortable seeing the Hitler Youth sections played for laughs, but that's probably just as well. It was very black humour, particularly the lines delivered by the ever-excellent Sam Rockwell. As it became apparent that the regime was willing to use children dressed in paper uniforms as cannon fodder to slow down the advancing Allied armies, the real dark heart of Nazism was exposed, and if it had been played entirely straight, then it would have been unrelentingly grim. 

Changing the tone slightly, the film I saw most recently in a cinema was A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. This starred Tom Hanks, as the real-life Mister Rogers whose show 'Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood' was a hugely popular children's TV show for decades in America. I have never watched that show so can't really compare Hanks' portrayal to the real person. During the film, Rogers is interviewed by a hatchet-job reporter who sets out to find the real Fred Rogers behind the TV persona, only to find that Fred is the genuinely nice guy he portrays on TV.

It's a schmaltzy film. Probably the schmaltziest film I've seen in a long time, with a family reconciliation theme in the life of the hardbitten reporter that was saccharine. There was a bit of the 'uncanny valley' about Hanks' portrayal as well. So overall it wasn't a film I'd bother watching again.

Onward was Pixar's film most affected by the pandemic, with it's release date bumped and then pulled completely in favour of release on Disney Plus. It's set in a fairy-tale style world that has modernised and magic has died out, although there are still creatures like unicorns (which knock over garbage bins to root through the trash) and fairies (who are a biker gang). The main story is about a young troll who discovers his late father was a magician and has created a spell that could bring his dad back from the dead for a short period of time. The spell goes wrong and only half his dad appears, so he and his brother go on a quest to finish the spell.

It had its moments, and lots of funny gags. The scene at the Manticore's Tavern was probably my favourite. But I felt it was trying too hard to make an emotional impact and unfortunately it couldn't land its punches. 

Enola Holmes was released on Netflix. It stars Millie Bobby Brown, who played Seven in Stranger Things, as Enola, the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes. She has the same sleuthing mind and puts it to use when her mother disappears. There is a sub-plot involving the suffragette movement but the main story involved Enola getting mixed up with a young aristocrat who is on the run because his life is in danger. 

I liked the film. Millie Bobby Brown carried it well, with lots of breaking the fourth wall. There was a scene filmed at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, and having been there and seen the sheds full of train carriages that are used in various period dramas, I found it quite amusing to try and see how many different coaches they used. This was based on the first book in a young adult fiction series, and I would be very keen to watch sequels.

Mulan was a live-action remake of the classic Disney cartoon, released on Disney Plus in lieu of a cinema release. I have two main issues with the film. Firstly, if you are going to remove the best character from a film, in this case Mushu the dragon, for the sake of 'realism' why replace that character with another supernatural character who was a bit crap? Secondly, if you are going to recreate an iconic scene, like Mulan triggering an avalanche with a fire rocket, why change the mechanism of that scene, and make it crap?

Disney keep remaking their classic cartoons as live action movies, and I've been disappointed with them. (Cinderella is perhaps the exceptions because the original cartoon is a really boring film anyway.) If Disney are going to keep doing remakes, they could at least be making Muppet versions of these films, which would be a lot more entertaining. 

On Christmas Day I watched Soul, which was released on Disney Plus. Ostensibly it's a film about death and making sure you actually live your life before you die. The  main protagonist, voiced by Jamie Foxx, is a music teacher with dreams of playing in a real band, who gets his shot only to die in an accident. As a disembodied soul he tries to make his way back to Earth, only to wind up in a therapy cat that has been brought in to comfort his comatose body in the hospital. 

There are other stories around that, with some telling points about people losing sight of their lives by focusing too much on one thing, or being afraid to actually live at all. The animation is absolutely gorgeous at times. There are several jokes with the usual selection of clever gags that will probably go over the heads of kids who watch it. And overall there is that bold theme of actually experiencing life while it is being lived and finding joy in that. Pixar often take these deep themes and present them in a new way, and they are probably the film studio making the most philosophically challenging mainstream movies at the moment. 

The final film I watched this year was The Midnight Sky, which starred and was directed by George Clooney, and released on Netflix. George was the sole survivor of a catastrophe on Earth, and spent the film trying to warn a returning spaceship crew that the planet was a radioactive mess. It was two hours long, but felt longer, was pretty bleak throughout and didn't have much of a resolution. The few action sequences had predictable conclusions. By now, if there's a spacewalk and everyone is really happy at how successful its been, there is bound to be a disaster. And there was.

So, of those eight films, I think three were worth recommending. They would be JoJo Rabbit, Enola Holmes and Soul. Whereas Mulan and The Midnight Sky are ones to avoid. 

USA & Canada 2016 - Toronto

I loved Toronto.

We stayed just around the corner from the Hockey Hall of Fame.

And a couple of blocks from the CN Tower.

When you get close you realise just how tall it is.

At the Tower's base, there's a railway museum.

Cathy posed with a caboose.

You can see the whole city from the top of the tower.

Next to the CN Tower is the Rodgers Stadium where the Blue Jays play. We went to see a game one night and they had the dome closed. First time we had seen indoor baseball.

There's loads to see back on the ground. I particularly liked the Freedom Arches.

Which are next to the city hall, that looks like an alien spaceship has just landed.

Toronto is full of impressive buildings. From bold, glassy new skyscrapers...

...to old-fashioned "flat-irons".

And all kinds of things inbetween.

There's even a concert hall that looks like a hat.

Toronto has pretty much everything you would want, including postcards and places to post them...

...friendly locals...

... poutine (cheese and gravy on fries - this is a vegan version!)

... and a Tim Horton's doughnut shop on just about every corner.

And at night they light it all so you can see where the landmarks are in the dark.

I loved Toronto.