Sunday 4 June 2017

Selected Sunday Snippets


Old news item removed. An fbb bludner of the inexcusable kind?

Back to the Future
Downham Market is a pretty little town ...
... situated on the electrified line between Kings Cross, Cambridge and Kings Lynn. It has an hourly service of electric trains enhanced to half hourly at peak times.
Naturally, the station has carried branding for Great Northern, now a bit of the new and much reviled mega Thameslink franchise.
Of course, it used to be part pf Chris Green's Network SouthEast (NSE) and, long after privatisation, still had its NSE sign.
So what is this, a picture that popped into the fbb in-box?
A brand new replacement sign, just like the old one.

The powers that be have refurbished the station in full NSE style and, according to all sources, it looks magnificent.
It's not just the colours, all the signs have been re-NSE-ed.
Below are Chris Green (ex NSE creator) wearing his railway heritage hat (far left - actually not wearing a hat at all) and other railway glitterati at the "official" launch of the new look a few weeks ago.
Wonderful! And here is the "before" version ...
... and the "after".

An Odd Place for a B15 to B Cn?
The B15 was supposed to be the natural successor to the once ubiquitous Leyland National ...
... the bus that dominated the National Bus Comany's single deck fleet in the 1970s amd early 1980s. But the B15 was not a great success. It's engineering was unpopular and a series of strikes and re-organisations at British Leyland did not help. Eventually the Olympian replaced it.

We now go to Kenwood Road in Sheffield, once the leafy home of the more wealthy suburban dwellers, but now replete with  offices and replacement blocks of flats.
It was here that Sheffield correspondent Roy found a purple B15.
It was having its purple paint touched up (hence paint pot bottom left).

the wonderful "Ian's Bus Stop" web site gives the vehicle's history in great detail. fbb offers the expurgated version!

10/79    new to Aldenham
 6/80    into service (North Street garage)
 9/94    privatised to Leaside Buses
         painted with gold Leaside Travel & swan logo
11/97    withdrawn
         bought by Arriva Scotland West
         centre doorway panelled over (no window)
 5/00    bought by Finch, Wigan
         window added to door panel
 9/12    sold to Used Coach Sales, (Warrington)
         bought by The Oak Loft,(furniture store)in
         Bridport, Torquay or Exeter
         painted purple
None of which explains how it gets to Kenwood Road!

The intrepid Roy asked the painters and records their response as follows.

Parked in Kenwood Road, having its paint work tided up. It will be used on a Channel 4 programme to be screened in November of this year - title not known (they wouldn't tell me). It will do a 3000 mile trip round the UK.

More news, as they say, when we have it.

Talyllyn Topics
The mysterious Twitter has sent fbb some lovely pictures of this historic narrow gauge line. Here is a train arriving at Rhydyronen amongst springtime floral magnificence.
William Wordsworth would have been in ecstasy! His unpublished variant version of "Daffodils" is appropriate here.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er Tywyn's hills,
At Rhydyronen was a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the line, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle at the close of day,
They filled the places by the line
along the margin all the way:
Ten thousand saw I brightly gleam,
Almost as lovely as puffs of steam.

Also, here is how the Talyllyn joins the "Thomas the Tank Engine" promotional craze.
The front loco is the real life Talyllyn posing as Sodor's narrow gauge Peter Sam ...
... behind is a red version of Duncan ...
... who, in literary form, is yellow.

Sodor's red narrow gauge loco is Rheneas ...
... surely a better disguise for the real-life Douglas?
Narrow gauge railway modellers can obtain the Bachmann model of Skarloey ...
... oddly only available in America.

And Finally...
It's not just fbb who gets it wrong. Here is an advert for a second-hand model bus from Hattons.
Not quite!

 Next Dorset Doom blog : Monday 5th June 

12 comments:

  1. FBB

    Can you pride a link for Ian bus stop site

    I kept getting error codes when I search via google

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. http://www.countrybus.org

      Delete
  2. The B15 was intended to replace the Atlantean and the Fleetline, not the Leyland National!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thirty years on, the NSE identity still looks surprisingly fresh, modern and bright which is more than can be said about Thameskink's dreary grey trains with their dreary grey interiors!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I suggest that First didn't much money from the Air show P&R this weekend - the event is not taking place until the end of August!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Looks like FBB has quoted an article from over 10 months ago , ie August 2016, when some of the drivers in Dorset were on strike - sounds like detention should be in order for such a school boy error lol!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Agreed. Minor defensive comment, however, that it is no always easy to identify dates of press items when they pop up suddenly in a general search.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes FBB it's so easy to miss '20th August 2016' at both the top of the article and next to every comment isn't it!

      Delete
    2. Will you be removing the relevant section then?

      Delete
  7. Downham Market - the replaced signage looks to be the last vestiges of WAGN Railway identity, meaning it has escaped both First Capital Connect and GTR Great Northern branding.

    Talyllyn - the locos are translatable to their Sodor equivalents on a one-to-one basis. Talyllyn and Dolgoch are Skarloey and Rheneas; it's Edward Thomas masquerading as Peter Sam in the photo, while Sir Handel is really Sir Haydn. Douglas arrived on the TR, I think after the original books were written - but fiction caught up with Duncan.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Bournemouth bus rally next weekend - Plymouth are coming up!

    ReplyDelete
  9. The purple bus is becoming a feature on our beautiful and leafy Kenwood Road and its an eyesore and not welcome! This is not a parking lot and workshop for rusty, environmentally damaging vehicles! This is very disrespectful to the residents of this heritage area...

    ReplyDelete