Lydney

Yesterday i made my longest rail trip for quite some time when i headed down to Lydney in Gloucestershire on the Severn estuary and not that far from the Welsh border. I had an enjoyable walk in Lydney including the Dean Forest Railway preserved line, photos of which you can see here. Other Lydney photos can be seen here.

Repton leaves Quorn

Repton departs Quorn & Woodhouse on the GCR.

SVR Diesel Gala 2019

The Severn Valley Railway Diesel Gala is one of the biggest preserved railway events of the year (at least for me) and this year's one did not disappoint with a great selection of guest locomotives including the prototype HST power car. It was not running due to technical issues so was only on static display but it was still the gala's rock star. I travelled up from Kidderminster to Bewdley and then up to Hampton Loade before returning to Kidderminster. You can see my photos here.

Heritage Shunter Trust Gala

On Saturday i headed up to Rowsley South via Peak Rail to attend the Heritage Shunter Trust's Autumn gala. A chance to see the various preserved shunters out in the sunshine instead of crammed into the shed (and thus much easier to photograph!) I also had a couple of brake van rides hauled by a Class 01 and a Class 02. Haulage i didn't think i would ever experience.

In my younger days such locomotive types were just things i saw in books, they were withdrawn from service by the time i was interested in railways and besides were based in far flung parts of the country i could never dream of visiting. I never thought i'd ever see one for real, never mind be pulled in a train by one! You can see my photos here.

York (2) : NRM Shildon

Going to the National Railway Museum's other site at Shildon was in fact the main reason i came up to York for a couple of days. While York is doable from Birmingham for a day Shildon is just that much further that doing it in a day is a bit marginal. So i've had to put off coming to NRM Shildon until now.

It was well worth the wait, the collection at Shildon is amazing and includes the likes of the APT-E and the iconic Deltic prototype. My favourite locomotive on display however was the North Eastern electric shunter. One of the very first railway books i bought in the mid-1980s was on electric locomotives and the North Eastern loco was in it and i looked forward to a time i could see it for real. Maybe i didn't think it would take quite so long to finally achieve this dream! You can see my NRM Shildon photos here.

"Project Commuter" Class 414 to be restored

North Eastern electric shunter, seen at last!

APT-E

Deltic

Winston Churchill

APT-E logo

Saving endangered photographs

Conserving historic photographs is a very complicated business because of the variety of methods used in early photography, and the science itself is a fairly recent development. This fascinating article traces the history of photo conservation and the complications involved. Research into photo conservation was spurred in the 1990s by the explosion in value of historic and artistic photos and the discovery of some frauds.

What astounded me was that there have been over 150 different photographic processes developed in the 187 years since Joseph Niépce first took a photograph of the view from his window. The article lists some of these including processes i've heard of like daguerreotypes and also others i hadn't like ambrotypes and kallitypes!

Photo from Flickr Commons, British Officer from Sir William Dixson's collection of ambrotype portraits, ca. 1857-1858, possibly by Thomas Glaister (State Library of New South Wales)