stamping ground

Great news - the post office is issuing a set of stamps in August and one of the first class values is shown above. Evening Star on the Pines at Midsomer Norton! I assume that Midsomer Norton will be doing a huge tie in with the issue of these stamps as this is really a once in a lifetime opportunity to push the station! It's even better that it's a first class stamp as these see vastly more use than the higher values in the rest of the set. Buy as many of these as you can and use them on all your letters and parcels! Issue date is 19 August 2010. There will also be a much larger postcard sized stamp card available.

midford - discuss ....

(Click on picture to enlarge and read text).

This is a plan for Midford put forward by George M Howard, who has recently created the Pines Express and Evening Star Facebook groups. This was merely a 'thought experiment', dreamed up before there were any plans to restore Midford. I do wonder if once we start work at Midford, which is now imminent, a trackless station will soon be too little, and thoughts will switch to laying track? 

new facebook

Another S&D relevant facebook group has just started up, this one concerning the locomotive 'Evening Star' which was not only the last steam locomotive built for British Railways (up to now of course!) but was also a regular on the S&D. To join click here..

twister over London

We were in London over the weekend celebrating our first wedding anniversary. We were offered an upgrade when we arrived at the hotel to a £1000 a night penthouse suite for £80 extra a night, so took it happily! The suite was amazing and one of the best features was a balcony overlooking the approaches to Waterloo station.

When I was a kid in the early 60s I used to visit my Nan up in Battersea. Her flat overlooked railway lines, but unfortunately all that ever used them were boring Southern green emus. But over in the distance you could see plumes of smoke - loads of them. For some reason my dad thought they were from Paddington but of course a little research revealed they were coming from Waterloo. Obviously they were coming from the Southampton and Bournemouth trains (and, right at the start, Salisbury and Plymouth trains). Steam lasted at Waterloo until 9 July 1967 on Britain's last steam main line.

Did I ever talk Dad in taking me to see them close up? No, I tried ...

But I'm sure it's those distant plumes that first got me interested in railways.

But on Sunday morning, 42 years on from the end of steam at Waterloo I finally DID get to see a steam train (fairly close up). After nearly two days of just 4 sorts of emus, on Sunday morning, just as we were about to leave there it was! And, amazingly, it was Tornado, the first main line steam loco to be built in the UK since 1960 (the S&D's Evening Star!)

It brought a lot of things together. Close up steam at Waterloo at last, a brand new steam locomotive which will, with a bit of tweaking to let them burn wood, doubtless be the first of 1000s in the 21st century, and even the 'old' Eurostar terminal at Waterloo in the foreground, showing that railways are always evolving!

little do we know

1989, West Somerset Railway. Ex-brother in law and none other than Evening Star! Now all has changed - Tere's remarried and Evening Star is stuffed and mounted in York and no longer running. In 1989 the S&D was totally closed and bereft of track.



18 years later and this is the S&D back with a vengeance. And who's that walking along the track? None other than Aubrey Punter, fireman on Evening Star's last up Pines Express through Midsomer Norton in September 1962!