Railway

What is it about railways? Up in the attic we still have the wooden railway the children played with when they were small, and it gets played with when children come visiting. When my Dad was a kid, the boys in that family had a train set that occupied the entire attic. Thomas the Tank Engine is still a great hit with kids. It's only when you travel on a steam railway that you remember how dirty they were. I like that smell of steam and coal dust, but it leaves a sooty patina behind. Clergymen are very often railway lovers (not my particular clergyman, BTW. He's into aircraft.)

Ivor the Engine! It's a long time since that delightful little Welsh animation was on television. Please bring him back!

Yorkshire is home to a few distinguished railways. The National Rail Museum is in York, and if you go to Pickering (where we lived for six years) there's a famous little steam railway that chunters across the moors to Whitby and back. Pickering no longer has a REAL train service, it's the bus or nothing, but the tourist railway puffs up and down throughout the summer. It was used as Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter series.

Today was sunny, it was Tony's day off, and we escaped to a little National Trust place with gardens, a tea room and a pond. To get there we drove past one of the main Yorkshire tourist attractions, the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. If you're into trains, it's a site of pilgrimage. If you're not, you may have seen it anyway because it was used in the film of The Railway Children. We have friends who simply can't understand how we've lived in the valley for so long and not ridden on the K and W V railway. If it was a dragon, now...

But then, there are other forms of transport I don't get on too well with. Did I ever tell you about the glider? Or the rollercoaster in the Tivoli Gardens?