A week in the Shire(s)

The shires in question were Shropshire and Worcestershire to be precise. It was my birthday week and with big plans to celebrate my birthday itself with rhinos, we needed to stay relatively near to where the rhinos live, just outside Kidderminster. (I've already mentioned some of what we did in my round up for March as we were away on the cusp of the month.)

We opted for a cottage rental on a working farm and horse racing stable just south of Bridgnorth. We had a couple of trips into Bridgnorth itself. It's a nice small town with some lovely little shops including Booka, a fab independent bookshop, and some historic buildings.

Bridgnorth is blessed with interesting railways. We rode on Shropshire's randomest railway (the Bridgnorth cliff railway), and also took some photos of steam engines at the Severn Valley Railway terminus as well.

Spotter spotted!

Across the county border, we went to a falconry centre in Hagley. This was exceptional value, with two flying displays included in the admission price. All the birds get to fly daily and they all seemed very well cared for. 

One of the flying displays went amusingly awry when a peregrine falcon decided to fly off leaving the presenter in the lurch. He did a good job carrying on talking to the audience while the peregrine resolutely didn't come back. 

I put some pics from the falconry centre in the March round up post. But here are some more...

I had a fun week of football, with trips to Ludlow Town and AFC Bridgnorth before a Good Friday game at Shrewsbury Town, the day after my birthday. Salop were playing Tranmere and won! The three points were a great belated birthday present.

My friend Paul had come up from Cardiff and came to sit next to me in the second half. Here we are looking suitably thrilled during the match. (Thanks to Podge and his super zoom lens from the other end of the ground!)

I also saw my friend Jim and his son, Nick, at the game. Jim is the friend I went to Malaga with back in February. I made them pose for a selfie.

After the game we had a family pizza evening at my brother's house. I even had balloons to remind me of my advancing age.

And so, after a week that went by very quickly, we departed the shire(s) and returned home to Wales.

STEAM - the Great Western Railway museum

I mentioned visiting STEAM in Swindon in my bank holiday sports round up. Here are a few more bits and pieces that caught my eye there.

STEAM is housed in one of the Great Western Railway's former foundry buildings. The railway engineering works was pivotal to the growth of Swindon as a large town, although that industry has disappeared now. Most of the former locomotive works is now the outlet shopping village next door.

The museum starts with several exhibits explaining how the foundry worked and its importance in the area. I went through those parts fairly quickly to get to the more exciting stuff - the steam engines.

There were several locos in the museum, including no.6000 King George V. Fun fact: my Dad had a model of this on his model railway when we were kids and I think my brother still has it.

Dad also had a pannier tank engine, and so did the museum. Different scales of course.

One of the highlights was going underneath a loco and being able to look up and see the interior workings.

I thought this Wickham inspection trolley was a fun, unusual item.

The Welsh connection to the GWR is huge because the railway absorbed almost all the Welsh railway companies. Four of the companies are on these plaques.

And there were several other Welsh themed exhibits.

The GWR did a lot to publicise Wales and the West Country as a tourist destination. 

The GWR also owned several road vehicles. The museum had restored this old fire engine.

And I liked this Scammell tractor unit.

STEAM is also the venue for several Lego events during the course of the year and so, naturally, there was a Lego train too.

All in all a decent way to spend a morning in Swindon.

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. 

Birthday number 47 - at the Severn Valley Railway

Following our very busy March, we felt we needed a break and booked a cottage in North Worcestershire, not far from Kidderminster. I thought about going to the Severn Valley Railway on my birthday and when I looked it up I discovered it was the "Open House" weekend which meant various areas that were normally off limits were open for people to have a wander around. And by people, I mean us!

I have already blogged about a funny juxtaposition I saw on our visit. But here is a big write up of our day.

The Open House ticket also gave us unlimited trips on the railway. We arranged our travels up and down the line on the service pulled by a steam train. Here's a photo of the loco taking a break at the Bridgnorth end of the line. 

As we left Kidderminster we passed the West Midland Safari Park and the rhino house. It was the first time in my life I had seen rhinos from a steam train. An excellent way to start our train adventure. 

Our first stop of the day was at Highley where we visited the big engine shed exhibition and museum.

Along with several locos, there was also a travelling post office (TPO) carriage.

Letters and parcels were literally sorted in transit as the train was moving along. The TPO service ran as late as 2004 although in a greatly reduced fashion from its heyday in the early and mid twentieth century. The Great Train Robbery was of a TPO car back in the sixties. 

They had several locos as well, including 'Gordon', a giant blue engine that was formally on the Longmoor Military Railway where army personnel were taught to drive steam trains. 

A fun aspect of being at the railway on an open house weekend was knowing that you could have a close up look of the various bits and bobs that have accumulated off to one side. Like workmen's trolleys.

Like every heritage railway there is a variety or random rolling stock sitting in sidings. Cathy pointed out this handy place to store improvised gunpowder if you found yourself accidentally making some.

There was the instantly recognisable profile of a Class 37 diesel loco under a heavy tarpaulin awaiting restoration.

We caught the train back a few stops and got off at Bewdley where there was the opportunity to have a brake van ride behind a trusty Class 09 diesel shunter. These are very similar to the Class 08 (known as Gronks) but are fewer in number than the 08s. 

We took a ride in the GWR 'Toad' style brake van.

More random rolling stock - a banana fan poses with a banana van.

And a relic from South Wales, a Barry Railway coach that was partly restored.

Another short trip later and we were in Bridgnorth, the other terminus of the Severn Valley Railway. Here the machine shops and repair shed was open. They had lots of engines in various stages of repair. Some of them were just down to their frames. Others were missing cabs. 

Everywhere we went there were vintage posters. Here's a photo of Cathy pointing at one for Wales, which seems a suitable place to finish this write up.