robertatforsythe

Parenting

2012-01-10T20:41:00.000-08:00

As someone who is drawn to struggle with faith in the divine, the logical and most consistent obstacle to belief is that of suffering. In logic this will produce all the obstacles anyone might want who is bent on not believing. God's existence cannot be " demonstrated" nor "justified" in logic in the face of pain although heaven knows people try. A long lasting attempt to do so is that of the Genesis account whereby a male dominated society managed to pin the blame on their female companions. The gall of that is breath-taking so let's be clear, Genesis is a great tale for those wedded to patriarchy. In any modern progressive society, it is exactly that, a tall story. One that even so reveals much about human nature and our duplicitious short-comings in creating stories with which to justify ourselves: " it was'nt me Guv".

The answer is even closer to home. Which of you, as adults, knowing full well the human condition, will say the logic of this situation demands that I must not visit it upon another being without their consent? The logic is clear, to create without consent, new beings destined to labour in pain and die is unreasonable. So why do we do it? Because our nature demands we do and that is the divine spark in us. God the Father behaved in just the same way when time dawned roundabout the Big Bang. And what made Him and us behave so? The mere sexual lust, a need for an old age insurance policy? To reduce humanity to this (does Dawkins do this?) is extra-ordinarily cynical. No, there is something bigger and more embracing of lust called Love.

Love is the hope that it can all be made worthwhile, Love is the joy of being with. A joy so intense that it will create the slave's desire to be with the Dominant and to accept their discipline. That is one intense picture. It is also the Love that enshrines the child, that inspires self-sacrifice, to labour and toil to provide for one's children. Love is the one key that can unlock faith in God and to understand Love you need not look any further than at the best of parenting. Which must include the idea of letting go.

The principle of letting go was built into the creative moment. Kenosis, self-emptying, putting aside the classic human created attributes of the divine. These are what religion creates, the vengeful, angry jealous father. The Old Testament God who will willingly embrace murder to achieve his ends and who still as modern Middle Eastern history shows is abroard on this planet.

Yet His Son showed His true Father's nature to us all 2000 years ago and we do not see the blindingly obvious. Creation without a father may appeal to those who see no need to believe but it is breath-takingly illogical in itself. Far far better in my opinion to believe that persons did press the buttons and that those persons accepted in themselves that they would become part of the process. A process that would need sacrifice to redeem sinful men, blood would be split. Blood to redeem is one of the most basic of human's forces. But that one sacrifice would be enough to vitiate all others and to spit in the face of all who kill in the name of God. God's own Son willingly undertook this task fully knowing what was afoot and knowing, though this age bereft of scientific knowledge could not know this, that the Cross does not just carry human sin. The Cross is also the most utter moment when God subjects Himself publicity to His own creative progress. It is the moment of His death, it is the death of religion too. What happened next in this unique story? What was it that made a Church spring to life? What is the mechanism that continues to inspire people to commit to Jesus Christ?

A pat on the back for New Year 2012

2011-12-30T05:54:00.000-08:00

A totally unexpected read just now on our MP's blog.

I quote

"Local champions: for their effort for local causes without reward - Tom Martin, chair of Wylam Parish Council, East Tynedale Olympics and so much more, and the fascinating Robert Forsythe, who works tirelessly in Prudhoe - both should be Local County Councillors, whoever they stand for, given the amount of public work they do."

Thanks indeed.

Guy Opperman has imaginatively constructed an appealing list of people and organisations and concepts to thank and praise. My real favourite in his list was the humble Northumbrian tea shop cheese scone. For which you can look at Tea Rooms of East Tynedale.

The Courant explains why the Prudhoe Town Centre determination was cancelled

2011-12-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

Just over two months after the Prudhoe Town Centre application was pulled the Courant front page and editorial today discuss what they believe brought things to a halt. Detailed and renewed objections from the Co-Op. Not the drains and sewers (Clochemerle) which have also taken our time this autumn. Courant phraseology embraces "failed process" and "beggars belief" and firmly finger wags at both the County Council and the Northumberland Estates. Like many others I am sure, I have no idea how this will end but I do know Prudhoe deserved the preparation of a really excellent scheme from its landlord. http://robertatforsythe.blogspot.com/2011/05/when-good-is-not-good-enough.html

Meantime I continue my crusade for an independent butchers in Prudhoe. I am perfectly willing to support the new development if it answers the needs and concerns of those who live here. So an update from last Wednesday. Letter from Northumberland Estates to RNF arrived today with regard to a butcher in Prudhoe's new town centre. "We would have no problem with an independent butcher in the Prudhoe scheme should one come forward". There remains the issue of the planning zone which says Non Food Retail but to me this is a major clarification. What is needed now is to find an interested butcher?

Information about the Prudhoe Town Centre

2011-11-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

Two thoughts just now on Prudhoe's new centre. Matthew 7:12 "So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." . Had that been a guiding principle in the design of the proposed centre, much of the pain could have been avoided by the designers asking themselves would I wish to live in the neighbouring properties once this work was finished? To see the result of not doing so, explore this link http://committees.northumberland.gov.uk/aksnorthumberland/images/att9996.pdf

. And by playing with the 999x sequence up and down you can find all or a huge amount of correspondence in the public domain about the project. Very instructive. Thanks Clive Elsdon for some tuition here.

Is the Prudhoe Town Centre redevelopment abandoned and if so Why?

2011-11-18T01:15:00.000-08:00

A month ago the Prudhoe Town Centre redevelopment scheme looked all set to receive its planning permission after years of twists and turns. About a day beforehand, the meeting was cancelled. Since then something of a catch all about legal advice and the applicant being required to submit more information has sufficed by way of explanation. I have asked councillors, the chairman of the Prudhoe Community Partnership who is also the vicar, for explanations. Nothing in any detail is forthcoming. The Hexham Courant has hardly been able to expand the knowledge base. This week its publishes two letters from opposing sides of the spectrum: Peter Gallagher and Tony Williamson. Sometimes people wonder why I don't get more involved in the actual political structures. Read those letters for an answer. It is mudslinging and misunderstanding on both sides and that is not something I wish to take part in. Nonetheless this inability to communicate between the various parties may go far in explaining why this process has become so frustrating over many years. The process goes back some years before the original application for the current scheme was submitted in 2007. Now in bullet point form, I intend to list out some of the reasons why I suspect if the current scheme is dead, that is so. Tony Williamson's letter (pro) seemed to suggest it is dead although on what evidence I do not know. Perhaps the results of the Sainsbury consultation this September were so negative as to disincentivise them?

At the outset the scheme should have had a vision and a name. One that encapsulated the excitement of what was on offer. I have several times in this blog referred to The Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe. This was not a random choice and only incidentally was meant to allude to a fate for the protagonists. The Hanging Gardens concept is one of antiquity and refers to the hillside. The space for the development is the last open space left within Prudhoe's centre. It sits on one of Prudhoe's greatest assets: its hillside. The development owner is famed for the Alnwick Garden. It is basic common sense that the two be combined and that above everything else encompassing the shops and the houses, there would be a Garden experience of such notability that it made Prudhoe a destination. A multi storey car park or a Supermarket facade could have become an exercise in hydroponics. People with memories in Prudhoe realise that the Co-Op development and its car park destroyed a very pleasant park.
As such the scheme needed to be 21st century in nature. I often asked those for the scheme to outline for me its 21st century elements. They never have because it is'nt. It is a scheme from the 1980s. And it never really took cognisance of its hillside location. The hillside became a problem not an asset. And that is how we ended up with Berlin Walls, sound barriers and massive blocks of development overlooking houses.
An element of a 21st century scheme would have been efficient communication to sell the project. A regularly maintained website with an updated FAQ responsive to questions could have worked wonders. The site is surrounded by houses and the proposed development literally looks down on many. Pleasing the neighbours should always have been paramount to remove objections. IT could have helped this, instead the developers seemed to stir up a hornet's nest amongst their intended neighbours.
The information provision was always poor. Dumping huge arrays of files in the library and calling that consultation was anything but. Again a website could have had a 3d walkthrough, which, had the plan had inherent excitement, could have convinced the doubters. It simply did not seem that Northumberland Estates ever wanted to enthuse the community. It looked as if they took them for granted. It certainly did when as this blog shows the Estate has spent months claiming on its own website to have planning permission for the project when it had nothing of the sort. A public consulation inviting responses took place in August/September of this year and not a word about the results has yet been forthcoming.
Four elements of detail (at least) excited consistent adverse comment (other commentators may suggest more). The big three for me were the multi storey car park, the restrictive covenants on the shops and the new junction on station bank. Each of these three it seemed to me was unwelcome and unworkable. Probably the one highest on my agenda and those I spoke to, were the restrictive covenants. It looked like swopping one supermarket monopoly for another. The knowledge that at the end of all the upheaval, a whole genre of shops would be excluded like a butchers, wholefood (Holland and Barratt), a Thorntons, a fishmonger was amazing. Just what sort of town centre was this going to be for the largest town in Tynedale?
The fourth element really became evident this summer and perhaps it was this that pulled the meeting on the 19th October? The situation with the drains and the sewers. I have heard so many incompatible versions of this. One argument says that the development was actually going to solve the problem because it was to have a separate drainage system to the river. If so that was not made clear in Fairhurst's summary handed out in October 2010. Another argument says that the Estate maintained there was no springwater on the site when clearly there is. What appears to have driven the point home was the event of 6th August when it became manifestly clear that Prudhoe's current drainage system was not working. The simple point to me is that Prudhoe operates with a 600' hydraulic head and that unless development is exactingly married to that fact, some dramatic problems will arise.
It is evident that the matter of leadership and trust comes into this. Whether in respect of the springwater or their claim to already have planning permission, the Estate lost the community's confidence. The Duke never once came the 3o miles to engage with the population. The whole affair of the Judicial Review articulated this. The proposal was rejected once by a judge and although it could be argued this was on a technicality, commentators like the Hexham Courant certainly interpreted this as a rebuff to the Estate's plan which had already then attracted thousands of objectors. I certainly thought that when the plans were represented at a consultation in St Mary's Parish Hall in October 2010, one would see a radically changed scheme taking account of the many concerns which by then were well known. I remember being amazed by what I saw and I remember the inescapable mood of those in that room. They were angry. More than anything else, this was the moment I decided to start quietly taking soundings amongst people as I met them. Gradually over several months, I became astonished at what I learnt. Very successful business people were explaining to me exactly why the proposed scheme would not work. Other people were expressing amazement that successful businesses like the existing snooker hall were going to be sacrificed with no arrangements for their replacement. I was very surprised to discover that this did not seem to concern the Prudhoe Community Partnership.
A very sad consequence of all of this as the letters in the Courant have consistently shown is that the landowner's scheme has entirely divided the community. It is not difficult to find heated arguments developing over the affair. Neighbour can quite literally fall out with neighbour. Since the landowner in this instance is not some absent commercial entity but the feudal landlord, I judge that to be somewhat scandalous.
As Tony Williamson's letter says, the land will be developed. It cannot be left. If indeed the Northumberland Estates/Sainsbury scheme is dead, how might I suggest going forward? The asset of the land and its view is so valuable to the community that the Prudhoe Community Partnership should raise funds to buy the land and find a new development partner. One who would really work with this community to develop a scheme which would enthuse the community. Perhaps the result will not be a Sainsbury? It might be a Morrisons or an Aldi. I don't mind. I never objected to a new supermarket. The Co-Op as I repeatedly say to myself when forced into it, has not made any friends by its pricing or stocking policy (Consett offers a vastly wider array of supermarkets and other food outlets all competitively priced). So by all means lets have a new supermarket, some more housing, shops that allow for a butchers, but in all that let us make sure that the development treats the hillside in such an exciting manner that it will become the positive talk for 50 miles around.

Prudhoe's Drainage

2011-11-11T00:16:00.000-08:00

I went to the Prudhoe Civic and Community Forum meeting last night about the flooding. The most forceful presence came from a newly appointed West Area Highways manager Richard Hayes. It seems he is very ready to understand that Prudhoe has deep seated drainage problems that unless they are addressed will continue to cause a lot of distress to affected properties.

What I now say is a little bit of reading in: but I conclude his advice would likely to be no development planning permission until a wider study into Prudhoe's geology and drainage is concluded. And that one should not be surprised if the solution is an interceptor drain of some size running along the spring line. That is roughly from the west end of the bypass, along the back of Prudhoe Castle School, the bottom of the Kepwell, between Broomhouse Lane and the new development to the area of the Cockshaw Dene where it would discharge into natural drainage. This scheme would intercept surface and land water discharges.

Once it was in place, the capacity would be there to proceed with the town development.

The objectors were going on about granite! I had to interject. There is no granite anywhere near Prudhoe. I had the geology map with me to prove it. Apparently as one told me later, Fairhurst's had suggested this. If so this shows just how out of touch and hopeless the Fairhurst's input is. The geology of Prudhoe whilst complex is perfectly clear. The rocks are coal measures: coal, limestone, sandstones, shales, fireclays. Most are porous but the clays are not and will play a role in springlines. On top of the rocks there is boulder clay and sands and gravels. Plenty of the latter along the hillside clearly shown on the map. Where they meet clay, you get springs and where the underlying rock outcrops the same also happens.

It seems to me that previous developers have been allowed to get away with murder - especially as it now appears along Castle Road. It is very important that Northumberland Estates are not allowed to repeat this. They have had ample opportunity to do their work properly. They seem to have failed to do this. The objectors say that NE deny there are any springs on the development site. They have photographic evidence to prove otherwise.

To my mind the NE planning application should not be taken further until the drainage study is concluded and implemented. There is every reason a planning committee could want to say this to the applicant. There is no way that the applicant could object as they have manifestly failed to undertake the studies they should have done.

The event of 6th August was evidently very distressing and it has been followed up with smaller scale repeats since then including October 18th on Station Bank. However if these unfortunate events have injected some realism into the development plans in Prudhoe, something will have moved forward.

Tales from our National Parks

2011-11-07T02:38:00.000-08:00

Are any of you following the BBC series Tales from our National Parks? The theme combining heritage, landscape and planning would always interest me and with the other related planning thread of Prudhoe Town Centre I was bound to watch. Up there in my personal interest stakes with the Nick Crane series on towns earlier in 2011. What do I get from these programmes? That planners are in a strange world of their own. Last night the issue was the Tyndrum Gold Mine. It was absolutely clear an entire community on its ankers wanted the project and had waited quite long enough. Planning permission had previously been granted by an earlier authority. So what did a new National Park authority do with a chief executive from Greenpeace? Erect hoops every inch of the way. The whole issue really came down to the tailings dam, dealing with the waste. Common sense might have said say to the applicant, we support you but unless your application deals with the tailings in a way we can approve, don't bother. Oh no, the whole expense of a frustrated application was indulged in. A 12/10 vote down and another year spent on a re-application. All this effort could have been saved with some straight talking at the start. In reality life is not that simple. Perhaps the Park Authority never really wanted to say yes and had hoped that after one rejection, the applicant would go away. But they did not, instead reading between the lines, I suspect some influential supporters lent on the Park Authority (telling scene of the Park Convener giving the Chief Exec some guidance). Thankfully anyway Tyndrum will get its gold mine now. Sadly Honister does not look likely to get its zip wire. The Lakes say they want to be Britain's adventure capital. Yet they don't want a zip wire at Honister exactly where a cableway from the slate quarry worked for decades. The park authority has removed sports boats from one of the most obvious locations in Britain: Windermere, a huge space well able to accomodate speedboats in designated zones. I have my serious doubts that those running National Parks have any real ability to support business. They view their landscapes as precious artforms when in reality they are nothing of the sort. All the great National Parks had their wealth built on industry and this their current guardians are in denial over. And back at the ranch in Prudhoe, the story is rather different. Here there is a beautiful valley with no protection. There is a public who have made their views pretty clear: that any development should fit the landscape and not engender monopoly. And although the jury is still out (because a key meeting got pulled) I am not convinced the community's opinion really counts for much. That is the common thread: why don't planners listen to community opinion. And will the Prudhoe community have to take the type of measure the folk of Tyndrum did to get heard?

Also in today's news another Northumberland planning story whereby a 230 year old pub bites the dust for yet another Supermarket in Morpeth? What is it with those folk? Morpeth was a lovely town now being totally given over to car parks and supermarkets. There are at least three developments already in existence.

The Last Battle

2011-10-28T05:25:00.001-07:00

The Last Battle is a title of one of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books. It is really about the Christian Last Judgement. It evokes a landscape "further up and further in". An enfolding green landscape. One that I have since I was 11 identified with Weardale as seen from the A68 in the few miles between Fir Tree and Tow Law. I have driven that way 100s of times and on each occasion I call to mind Lewis' visualisation and think to myself about The Last Judgement. The Last Judgement has something of a bad reputation nowadays in this society. I can see why. Whilst as an artistic inspiration it has fed creativity of all sorts, it is also an instrument of fear. Centuries of church manipulation warped The Last Judgement to become a means of controlling earthly behaviour and manipulating power. The idea of finite sin meriting infinite punishment in the most awful of sensual forms excites the most frightening emotions (and we all know how attractive to a certain mind set a horror film is (I never got that genre, something missing in me)). I think that a history of The Last Judgement would reveal humans and a church at their worst.

Yet because of our bad behaviour and lack of faith in love should we ignore The Last Judgement? By no means, rather reflect on what Lewis perceived. That The Last Judgement is our own judgement on ourselves. For when we die and are confronted by the light of creating Love, what will we do? Will we bend down in fear seeking repentence? Will we run towards the light, knowing this was always our destiny? Or will we turn away from what is to what is not? Will our anger and pride destroy us? Whatever, it will be our choice. Truly The Last Judgement is the hour of destiny.

A quote from the book illustrates all this. From page 135 "'You see' said Aslan.'They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out'". Look around and you must be able to see this behaviour through human history whether in the great affairs of state or in the matter of marital relationship. Think of World War One. Was there ever such a deadly and un-necessary conflict? One that only the warped ideas of humans created. I reflect on Poincaré and how in World War One Claire Ferchaud was able to confront him personally in the simplicity of Christ. Or how it is that a mother of three children can walk away from them and their father because of "another man"? These are all things that happen, constantly around us. You can provide your own examples. What unites all, men of power or women of infidelity is that whilst Christ wishes to meet them in their sin as Jesus did in First Century Palestine, it is the human who refuses to meet Our Lord. As someone used to say to me in Ayrshire "You choose your bed and lie on it".

Northern's great strengthening.

2011-10-07T00:26:00.000-07:00

The information I share has come down a chain of command. It shows how from December 4th Northern will be strengthening its services. There is something called the Government HLOS High Level Output Statement for the rail industry. Depending on how you calculate, this promises Northern 100-150 further carriages to cope with the growth and overcrowding. The franchise was originally let as a stand still one. By December 2011, 42 extra carriages will have arrived and their planned deployment is now worked out. Overall many people will be very relieved.

Sadly I have a pretty clear gripe. Study the detail and only one train north of York comes into it. The 0741 Hexham Middlesbrough will be two Class 142 sets instead of one. Just one additional train has come to Heaton and it is another of the dreaded four wheel Pacer trains. It will spend most of its time as a back up thunderbird. That is not a bad thing but as regular readers of the blog know, my contention for just over a year now, is that the work of Heaton depot (Northumbria local trains) is a complete sideshow for Northern planners and nothing shows this better. My mind says that the only way this will change is if the politicians of the North East work together and insist on some dramatically different arrangements for the new franchise from about 2012. There is evidence that the DfT is listening to this and is inviting local councils to consider what role they could have.

The trains are listed by their current departure time at their point of origin followed by the current booked traction then by the booked traction from December.

AM Peak
06:13 Leeds-Man Vic 144(3), 144(3)+144(2)
06:21 Liverpool LS-Man Vic 156, 142+142
06:29 Huddersfield-Man Vic 142, 150
06:30 Harrogate-Leeds 144(2), 150
06:31 Huddersfield-Leeds 144(3), 144(3)+142
06:32 Rose Hill Marple-Man Picc 142, 150
06:36 New Mills Ctl-Man Picc 142, 142+142
06:36 Wigan Wall-Man Vic 142, 150
06:37 Leeds-Man Vic 158(2), 158(2)+158(2)
06:38 Leeds-Sheffield 142, 144(3)
06:43 Man Vic-Leeds 150+142, 150+150
06:50 Buxton-Blackpool N 150, 156
06:57 Huddersfield-Southport 156, 156+142
07:04 Lincoln Ctl-Sheffield 142, 142+144(2)
07:06 Man Picc-Sheffield 142, 150
07:13 Leeds-Man Vic 144(3), 144(3)+142
07:15 Wigan Wall-Stalybridge 150, 150+142
07:16 Liverpool LS-Huddersfield 150, 156
07:16 Rose Hill Marple-Man Picc 142, 142+142
07:22 Warrington Ctl-Man OR 142, 150
07:24 Buxton-Man Picc 156, 150+150
07:29 Adwick-Sheffield 142, 142+142
07:38 Wigan NW-Liverpool LS 150+142, 150+150
07:39 Man OR-Liverpool LS 156, 142+142
07:39 New Mills Ctl-Man Picc 142, 142+142
07:40 Clitheroe-Man Vic 150, 153+150
07:41 Hexham-Middlesbrough 142, 142+142
07:41 Rose Hill Marple-Man Picc 142, 142+142
07:42 Knaresborough-Leeds 144(3), 144(3)+144(2)
07:44 Todmorden-Wigan Wall 150, 150+142
07:48 York-Leeds 153+144(2), 150+153
07:59 Marple-Man Picc 142, 142+142
08:00 Man Vic-Leeds 144(3), 144(3)+144(2)
08:00 Wigan Wall-Man Vic 150, 142+142
08:06 Sheffield-Leeds 142, 144(3)
08:13 Wigan Wall-Man Vic 142, 150
08:15 Man OR-Liverpool LS 142, 150
08:22 Stalybridge-Liverpool LS 150, 150+142
08:24 New Mills Ctl-Man Picc 142, 142+142
08:24 Southport-Man Air 142, 142+142
08:30 Huddersfield-Man Vic 142, 150
08:32 Blackburn-Man Vic 153, 150
08:44 Liverpool LS-Stalybridge 142, 150
08:45 York-Leeds 144(2), 150
08:48 Marple-Man Picc 142, 142+142
08:59 Rose Hill Marple-Man Picc 142, 142+142

PM Peak
16:00 Southport-Huddersfield 142, 142+142
16:03 Man Air-Southport 150, 142+142
16:06 Man Picc-Rose Hill Marple 142, 142+142
16:10 Man Vic-Kirby 142, 150
16:13 Adwick-Retford 142, 142+142
16:13 Leeds-Man Vic 144(3), 144(3)+144(2)
16:18 Scunthorpe-Lincoln Ctl 142, 142+142
16:23 Man Picc-Marple 142, 142+142
16:27 Man Vic-Huddersfield 150, 156
16:29 Leeds-York 142+142, 142+150
16:30 Buxton-Blackpool N 156, 150+150
16:31 Liverpool LS-Wigan NW 156, 142+142
16:39 Leeds-Lancaster 144(2), 150
16:43 Man OR-Liverpool LS 142, 150
16:45 Man Picc-New Mills Ctl 142, 150
16:48 Wigan Wall-Rochdale 142, 142+142
17:00 Man Vic-Leeds 144(2), 144(2)+142
17:03 Man Picc-Marple 142, 142+142
17:06 Sheffield-Leeds 142, 144(3)
17:09 Clitheroe-Rochdale 153, 150
17:10 Man Vic-Kirkby 142, 142+142
17:13 Leeds-Man Vic 144(3), 144(3)+142
17:13 Man OR-Liverpool LS 142, 150
17:14 Sheffield-Leeds 144(3), 144(2)+144(2)
17:18 Man Picc-Sheffield 142, 142+142
17:27 Man Vic-Huddersfield 142, 150+142
17:48 Man Picc-Chinley 142, 142+142
18:00 Man Vic-Clitheroe 150, 153+150
18:00 Man Vic-Leeds 144(3), 144(3)+144(2)
18:00 Rochdale-Blackburn 142, 142+142
18:22 Man Picc-New Mills Ctl 142, 142+142
18:25 Liverpool LS-Man OR 142, 150
18:27 Man Vic-Huddersfield 150, 156
18:29 Leeds-York 144(2)+150, 150+150
18:31 Liverpool LS-Wigan NW 156, 142+142
18:32 Leeds-Sheffield 142, 144(3)
18:43 Leeds-Huddersfield 144(2), 144(2)+142
18:45 Man Vic-Wigan Wall 142, 150
18:55 Liverpool LS-Warrington 142, 150
18:59 Leeds-Knaresborough 144(3), 144(2)+144(2)

The Shepherds Dene Ramble Retreat

2011-10-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

From time to time I find myself participating or helping at Shepherds Dene Riding Mill. Shepherds Dene is a Church of England Retreat House welcoming all. It is jointly administered by the Dioceses of Newcastle and Durham. It is an excellent example of an Arts and Crafts House (think of a smaller Cragside) whose owner gifted it to the church in 1946. It sits on the side of the March Burn Valley 3/4s of a mile up the Slaley Road from Riding Mill. It has prominent resources on the net with its Facebook and website.

On Wednesday 28th September 2011, I joined a one day ramble retreat. A number of photos can be seen here. My summary account there said "Shepherds Dene hosted a ramble retreat led by Reverend Jeremy Chadd on 28th September 2011. 8 miles, 9 persons, three dogs, a welcome from the local landowner Jamie Warde-Aldham at Healey St John, four fords, one bog and six hours passed door to door. Add in breakfast, hearty lunch, afternoon tea and a eucharist for a tenner and Northumbrian Christians know how to offer hospitality and value for money. A series of mini reflections involving Abram, Ruth and Jonah along the line anchored the walkers into the ups and downs of life and faith along a route which cross crossed the March Burn. Two opportunities to repeat are in Shepherd Dene's 2012 programme."

In this blog the opportunity is being taken to describe the route in more detail. The walk is being offered again as part of the Shepherds Dene 2012 programme. It could be undertaken by groups or individuals independently of those opportunities. Shepherds Dene offers an excellent secure start/end for the walk which itself affords a very worthwhile introduction to the valley of the March Barn which is not exactly well known. For those staying at Shepherds Dene, the walk offers a nice day out.

How might it be categorised? If it was part of a county organised programme or a walking festival it would be rated medium. As the crow flies it is about 2 1/2 miles from Shepherds Dene to Healey Church. The walk's strength is its encounters with the valley of the March Burn with four crossings. The walk is not a straight line and this makes it around 8 miles.

The context is that of one of the north running burns/rivers that feed the Tyne between Hexham and Blaydon (Tyneside). The principal five are a group comprising the Devils Water which the A695 crosses at Dilston, that is the largest. The March Burn crossed at Riding Mill. The Guess Burn crossed at Stocksfield with a catchment running up through Apperley Dene to Whittonstall. The Stanley Burn joining the river at Wylam and running behind Prudhoe. The Blaydon Burn. All offer attractive walks and beyond the local area are not well known.

The March Burn catchment extends from Riding Mill (where it is called the Riding Mill Burn) past the policies of Shepherds Dene (where it is the March Burn). It then joined by the Dipton Burn (a glacial meltwater channel) and so drains an area up to the Derwent watershed mostly comprised of Broomhaugh and Riding, Slaley and Healey civil parishes.

The walk is entirely on the OS Landranger 87 Hexham sheet. For the larger scale Explorer sheets, it straddles the boundary of three. You will need 307 Consett, 316 Newcastle and OL43 Hadrian's Wall. If walking in association with Shepherds Dene, the retreat house has a 1:25,000 Explorer sheet printed on demand with the house at the centre. All the walk is on this sheet.

Go well shod. Most of the walking is on sound paths but there are some elements crossing the valley which can be muddy. No fording is necessary, footbridges exist at all four crossings, the fords are optional. But the approach paths can be wet, muddy and quite steep for up to a couple of hundred yards at a time. This write up describes the walk from Shepherds Dene. It is all on public rights of way save for the accesses to Shepherds Dene. The walk could commence in Riding Mill where bus and train services exist. This will add a further 3/4 mile in each direction. The advantage of using Shepherds Dene for any group is that catering, parking and a warm welcome can be assured. At the end of the day a chance to unwind on the patio with a drink from the bar looking across to where one has been is singularly pleasant.

The walk starts from Shepherds Dene's front door and heads north east up the entrance drive (not the exit one) to the Slaley Road. The road is then walked for 1 3/4 miles to NY993595. This is the most sustained public road walking on the route and care should be exercised. Turn left onto the bridleway and descend through Todburn Wood to the first burn crossing. Continue to ascend through woods until a field is reached. A path is indicated at a junction right. Use this along the edge of the field and wood. This will then re-enter the wood, descend and cross the burn again. At this crossing, the road has become a minor access road to a house. Follow it back uphill and along a minor climbing ridge through pasture (livestock). You reach a gated T junction. Turn left and start descending again. As you re-enter the woods note that the public path veers right. This can be missed and the next couple of hundred yards are probably the trickiest bit of the walk. You descend to Healey Mill which is very well preserved and probably seen by only a few hundred passers by a year. From the footbridge here the rock cut gorge heading upstream is dramatic. Across the bridge join the access drive to the mill and turn right, ascend again. Some bends follow but keep to the marked right of way. The alert will realise that Healey Hall is conspiciously in view and that the route will pass this. Do not walk straight to it leaving the right of way. The landowner has welcomed Shepherds Dene personally to this walk and unless permission has been sought users are respectfully requested to stay on the path.

The path is now heading SSW to join a public road from Slaley to Scales Cross at NY992570. Turn left along it. You climb slowly to the summit of the walk at 211 metres. Extensive views north are on offer. Walk the road for just a kilometre to Lane House. A tarmac road turns left and you will use it descending gently. As notices advice, this is a public path and not a public road. Therefore it is a quiet and a pleasant walk. It is the road through the Healey Hall estate. On the approach to Healey Hall, it and the walker should turn right. After just over another kilometre you will reach the few houses and the church that form the nucleus of this most unnucleated village. The church was built in 1860 and despite its apparent lack of potential congregation remains very much in use and in good condition. Please respect it.

If the walk has been arranged through Shepherds Dene, this point about two thirds of the way around, is identified as the major break point. A picnic lunch can (and has been) served, a church service can be arranged, and for those wishing to break their walk, this is a good rendezvous point. So after the refreshment spiritual as well as physical the walk continues by turning right along the minor (now public) road outside the church. In one hundred metres turn left along another public road. Walk 300 metres until a public path is signed heading north through at the moment young woodland. This is called Broomleyfell Plantation. Good views can be had north. After about a kilometre a public road is met at NZ012697. Turn left and within a hundred metres execute a sharp right down a public path using the tarred access road to High Plains. Follow this path which will turn left and make its way straight through the car parking area of High Plains in front of the farmhouse.

Be careful here to follow the path signs. The whole route is well signed but a word of caution, there have been plenty of stiles along the way. The path is signed around the north side of an exercise paddock and so towards Hemmels Fell. The route is basically west now for a kilometre. Two diverging paths are met, keep right downhill. Shepherds Dene will soon come into view about a kilometre north across the valley (see heading photo). As you leave the wood the path is clear running between two field boundaries. The Riding Mill area is notorious for its spring lines. Descending the hill possibly crosses some of these and can be wet underfoot. A gate into a pasture lies obviously ahead and through this gate can be found the worst conditions especially if cattle are in the field.

You are nearly back. The path descends through pasture to the last ford and footbridge. A small notice here advises about permissive paths direct to Riding Mill. To get to Shepherds Dene, there are two choices. Either continue north on the clearly signed path and you will reach the public road where you turn left and so into Shepherds Dene in another 400 metres. Alternatively having passed the gate north of the ford, it is possible without crossing any fences to use a physically present path beside the March Barn and through woodland into the Shepherd Dene property at the bottom of what is called the Woodland Walk. There are no rights of way through Shepherds Dene and this link is not a right of way.

That should help you around the walk armed with appropriate maps. You will see some wonderfully quiet countryside, a surprising amount of rocky cliffs and in season plenty of juicy blackberies. And if you have teamed up with Shepherds Dene a spiritual guide can make all the links to life's ups and downs whilst the catering arm will ensure you enjoy very wholesome "Northumbrian Farmhouse" fare. Your contact at Shepherds Dene is George Hepburn.

Prudhoe Town Centre meeting aftermath

2011-09-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

Some folk are wondering whether a compomise is that the shopping element goes ahead and the houses don't. My guess is that without the housing the viability of the rest of the development comes into question. I do not mind the land in question being developed. I don't mind a Sainsbury, I don't mind new shops including a butchers, I don't mind a car park done discretely. I don't mind new houses. I don't want Station Bank to become a nightmare. I do want the location of the hillside and the skills of the estate in gardening to be integrated into the development. In my mind I don't see why Berlin walls are needed if the design was good. I do want a partner who is trustworthy and does what they undertake to do (and that seems an issue at Alnwick). What is so difficult about my aspirations? Or any they just the ramblings of a naive idiot?

The Prudhoe Town Centre Meeting 5th September 2009

2011-09-05T23:56:00.000-07:00

From my Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001912940850

Robert Forsythe
‎"But Mr Barnes told the meeting at Prudhoe High School: “It isn’t possible to have a new town centre, if that’s what Prudhoe wants, without some people being affected.”

Read More http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2011/09/06/we-ll-be-encased-in-a-concrete-wall-61634-29369219/#ixzz1X9WNu1A1"

‘We’ll be encased in a concrete wall’ - Today's News - News - JournalLive

www.journallive.co.uk

PLANS to redevelop the centre of a Northumberland town were last night slammed as “a disgrace” by angry residents.

· · Share · 6 minutes ago

- Robert Forsythe If Mr Barnes listened to other architects and read my blog or Facebook he might understand that you could have a town centre redevelopment much more in harmony with both the 21st century and the hillside at Prudhoe than the one Northumberland Estates propose. His take it or leave it attitude, his cannot make an ommelete without breaking a few eggs approach is at the root of why so many people in Prudhoe find Northumberland Estate's treatment of this community deeply offensive. There are a few people within Prudhoe who suggest we should accept second or third best. They should reflect deeply on the concerns in the minds of hundreds of people last night.
  about a minute ago ·
- ======================================================
I was not at the meeting last night. I did not need to be. There were hundreds of people wanting to put their point of view and be heard. My wife was one of them. The little clip I reproduce from this morning's Journal well sets the tone. Co-incidentally yesterday afternoon a new consultation brochure came through the post. It is uploaded along with some comment here. Not to point out that this is a multi storey car park or that the only food retail is Sainbury is to be economical with the actualite.

Guy Opperman's Charity Walk

2011-08-25T11:12:00.001-07:00

I was very pleased today to support our MP Guy Opperman's charity walk by which he is returning to work after his recent illness. He will be blogging extensively about it. Look North did a piece this evening on what was Day Two from Millennium Bridge to Heddon which I joined. A nice walk, saw Newcastle and the river from unexpected angles and explored some historic trackbeds. More photos and details went into my Facebook today. One photo will head up this blog entry showing Look North interviewing Guy at the very pleasant river Tyne scape in Newburn Riverside country park.

Sequencing Prudhoe's new town centre

2011-08-04T18:53:00.001-07:00

One of the oft repeated comments I get put to me reflects the concern people have about how Prudhoe will function whilst its planned new town centre is made. Two existing blocks of shops are to be demolished and I know that business people in them and nearby are very concerned about the direct impact on their livelihood. I shall suggest what is only my personal take on how the changes could be achieved.

The over riding reflection I offer is to reduce the impact on Front Street and its businesses as greatly as possible. Personally for me an end outcome is also no lasting change to the traffic management on Station Bank. A temporary change is a different matter however if it enables the first sentence of this paragraph to be achieved. To start the development I would create a temporary access off Station Bank. The entire area of former allotments through to the car park and the Legion building area would then become "site". Leaving aside the issue of the housing adjacent to Station Bank for now (this is phase 2 in the plan), I would then build whatever had been approved of the main retail etc development running back from Front Street but leaving the two existing blocks on Front Street intact and functioning.

Once the development behind Front Street had been built a temporary access into it from Front Street could be created using existing roads. At this point traders in one of the blocks to be demolished on Front Street could be invited to move into the new development. And the development could start functioning in a part completed manner. With one block cleared of occupants, it could then be demolished and whatever had been approved of the new development in that area completed. The process would then be repeated for the second block. And once that was demolished and the new development in its footprint finished, what the developers call Phase 1 would then be complete. At which point for my money, because the proper accesses off Front Street would then exist and because I have no faith in the long term wisdom of an access onto Station Bank, that access would be closed. Although I accept that the experience of having a temporary access during construction may itself become a useful indicator of which way the long term judgement on that matter would go. I would want to see a very robust planning condition that governed this matter.

What is written here is purely to answer the question about minimising disruption. It is not to prejudge the actual content of the plan which as everyone knows is the subject of heated debate. If a reader has not seen them, the thoughts in this blog about what I call The Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe could be read. And a final aside, if in Phase 1 engineering assessments found coal on the site, why not take it out? And if any such hole was capable of accomodating a multi storey car park would that not solve a problem. A car park that had a garden or such like on top. Search in my Facebook and a photo of just one such is offered.

Peter Hetherington

2011-08-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

What I would characterise as a well argued middle of the road letter is published in Friday August 5th Hexham Courant (on sale tonight in Prudhoe Waterworld) about the great Prudhoe debate. Its author is Peter Hetherington of Wylam who is a very credible journalist http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/peterhetherington .

One other letter and one piece on same subject in the paper. Key additional fact I get is a breakdown of the objections. 2668 plus 1231 plus 118 plus 7 is 4024 which accounts for the 4000 objections often mentioned. Out of 12,500 population this is quite a tally.

Is this a priceless advert or what?

2011-08-04T02:47:00.000-07:00

Is this a priceless advert or what? Source CILIP Update August 2011 p49.

Imported from my Facebook 2nd August 2011

2011-08-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.northumberlandestates.co.uk/business_commercial.php

The Estates also has planning permission for a number of other major developments to be progressed in the future including:

* A new supermarket development and housing scheme at Amble in Northumberland
* A new town centre shopping complex at Prudhoe near Hexham
Robert Forsythe
For those interested in the Prudhoe redevelopment, keeping a regular eye over the Northumberland Estates pages may be useful http://www.northumberlandestates.co.uk/news.php?id=260
Duke opens affordable housing in Lesbury | News | Northumberland Estates
www.northumberlandestates.co.uk
A scheme of affordable new homes which will help families stay in the locality was opened by the Duke of Northumberland today.Social housing specialist Isos Group is behind the £1.65m Townfoot development of 12 houses and bungalows in the prosperous Northumbrian village of Lesbury...............................................

Ludlow and Prudhoe

2011-07-29T00:11:00.000-07:00

Last night a new BBC2 programme from Nick Crane looked at the 10,000 strong community of Ludlow. Apparently very different to Prudhoe but listen to it, the parallels are clear. One of the mini-stories, Tesco. The community fought for eight years to get the supermarket they were prepared to have. Tesco finally agreed to a unique design fitting the parameters of the site. It can be done. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012zy8d

Another public meeting about the town centre?

2011-07-25T04:01:00.000-07:00

Once again the divisions within Prudhoe about the proposed new town centre are writ large in last Friday's Hexham Courant. It is front page news and there is an editorial which I would sign up to totally. The development is that the Mayor of Prudhoe has found a mechanism whereby a public meeting can be called at which the County Planning Committe will have to listen to further comments. Trying to be a spectator rather than a partizan is a bit challenging but here goes with some thoughts.

Clearly the Planning Committee do not welcome this development. That is unfortunate. One would think they would welcome every opportunity to re-assure those concerned. It would be unfortunate as well if the meeting takes place "next month" which is August when many people will be on holiday. To be fair to everyone the meeting should take place as soon as possible once the schools return. For it to appear rushed through when many people are away would again suggest this is not genuine consultation. The comments made about the Police also appear unfortunate. To so directly anticipate trouble is not to encourage law abiding citizens like myself to wish to attend.

It will be obvious for those most disadvantaged directly by the new scheme to make comment. I feel for anyone in Cranleigh Gardens, Neale Street and the other areas where this development will "look down" on their properties. They have real objections. Even so I think the best way to make inroads on the Planning Committee members will be to show how within its own terms the application is unsatisfactory. I have heard of numerous detailed aspects of this and no doubt these will come out.

However I would advocate keep it simple and direct. The multi storey car park, the new road onto Station Bank, the restrictive covenants on the new shops, these to my mind are all strong cards about why the present proposal does not lead to a good outcome.

There is also a message to those who may support the scheme. There are probably four people who really can influence the outcome of all this. The Duke himself. The Chairman of the Prudhoe Community Partnership who also happens to be the vicar. There are two members of Northumberland County Council from Prudhoe. Coun. Bill Garrett is a member of the planning committee and may not express a view before the determination. Coun. Neil Bradbury may, and he has expressed a view. He is broadly in favour of a regeneration project.

What is my message to them? At a personal level I do believe in a town centre development, this blog has outlined ways in which it could be done before. The Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe strapline. Yet where have we got today? The Town Council voted 4/3 against. The Mayor clearly feels that she will risk her reputation by insisting on another public meeting which unless it powerfully demonstrates the opposition that there really is will backfire. In other words and as the Courant has shown for weeks, the town is completely divided. Probably somewhere in the 60/40 area either way. If this last sentence is correct a fascinating question then becomes, how do the two County Councillors represent this?

If I was any of these four people - and certainly if I was the vicar - I could not vote for anything which had become so divisive. Personally I hope that this now anticipated meeting never takes place and that Prudhoe ceases washing its dirty linen in the Courant. I hope that the principals who really can make a difference would work together. The probable outcome to keep the peace in this town would be to recognise that the application as it is should not go forward. It should be back to the drawing board with a determination to produce a proposal really born from within the community and partnered by the skills shown at Alnwick Garden to produce a development that truly excited those who live on our wonderful and beautiful hillside. Outlines of the project are here.

Murdoch

2011-07-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

Just watched Vivian White and Panorama on Murdoch. Unmissable, go to I player. Two of the heroes who exposed Murdoch: Chris Bryant a gay MP and Max Mosley whose BDSM enthusiasm News International exposed. Mosley has funded very ordinary people in their civil challenges. Breathtaking viewing and Lord Sugar is a hero too.

Prudhoe's town centre, the community partnership and the Courant

2011-07-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

For week after week, Tynedale's local paper the Hexham Courant has carried on an ongoing debate about these matters. I have kept out of it. The problem is that it reads more like a slanging match than a debate and it is a truly sad position for a town of 12,000+ to have reached. The Courant is out again today and the argument is continued. Last week's shock news was that the Prudhoe Community Partnership's website had been taken down after person(s) unknown had hacked it adversely.

One thing I can be sure about. That event was completely uncalled for and does no-one in a small town any good whatsoever. Over recent weeks as I wander about I have quietly and at an anecdotal level sought out views. One way to put it is to look up above where I live and ask the question, how would I feel if a multi storey car park was appearing above my house? This is the prospect for residents of the Castlefield estate. I cannot avoid saying I would not be very happy.

Search my blog and several entries about the development have been made. I have tried to be positive about it. I can see ways in which the area concerned can be redeveloped to the great credit of Prudhoe and in a manner which will really draw people here. I also will go on record as applauding the work which the Prudhoe Community Partnership has done. It has played a vital role in the Prudhoe Transport Interchange and in the Cockshott Dene renewal. It is now going forward with an exciting multi purpose build on the library site.

Many good things have happened in Prudhoe and many more could in the future. But I caution all involved in the future of the town, stay cool, listen to what your opponent is saying, seek to find the common ground and work on it. Everyone has to live together here and with the consequences of whatever may be built and do not get involved in cyber war!

For more information click. A view completely independent of my own but very pertinent to the matter is expressed here.

Some aphrorisms

2011-06-17T02:45:00.000-07:00

Years ago, the questing spiritual side of me started "writing". For a while it was a page on my own website. I took it down when we had Clare. I was too busy to want to deal with "hassle" that my troublesome views might engender. But I carry on writing in a genre that is simply me and as soon as you label it morphs. Over on Facebook some of our photo captions hint at it. I wonder if the blog can stand any of it. Here are some short aphorisms which started the old page.
_________________________________________________
The transforming power of love

Appears to me the only basis

By which the Church and Christ

May re-establish themselves.
==========================================
Academic research

should not be a methodology

but a drama.
=========================================
If the world cannot order itself

To treat its citizens aright

Is it my fault if I cannot cope with it?
=========================================
What makes humanity?

That we can do things better.

What might be grace?

When things are done better.
=========================================
If Society does not owe you a job

What do you owe Society?
========================================
I would rather be my wife's sex slave

than anyone else's wage slave.
========================================
If Fiona was all gold and mine

I would weep with bitterness.

I should rather die prematurely

than get divorced.
=======================================
1+1=1

1+1=2

1+1=3

Discuss in what circumstances these statements might be true.
=======================================
Man has always sought a virtual world.

It is the religious driver.
=======================================

Women priests are a Biblical impossibility

So also is homosexual marriage.

Grant one and the other might follow.

Two perversities for the conservative.

Why should Christ's grace not liberate us

From the strictures of gender?
===========================================
The price of freedom in creation is the price of pain

However for many that may seem a price

Too heavy for the reward.

A disturbing discovery is that Nature bullies.

Vulcanism and glaciation were hardly man's fault.
==========================================

Lie

2011-05-25T02:26:00.000-07:00

When we both realise
we might be living a lie
then we might make
some progress

said
the catholic to the protestant
the believer to the unbeliever
the christian to the muslim
the woman to the man
the communist to the capitalist
the straight to the gay

When good is not good enough.

2011-05-16T00:58:00.000-07:00

The Prudhoe redevelopment debate rumbles on. It has been previously explored at http://robertatforsythe.blogspot.com/2010/10/hanging-gardens-of-prudhoe-aka-prudhoe.html . Two things brought it back into view for me. I took this photo and the Hexham Courant appeared last Friday 13th May 2011. I think it was the previous one that contained a long anti letter. This time the first two letters at some prominent length reflected the views of one anti and one pro campaigner. Both are well known citizens of the town. As I read them a sense of profound disappointment passed over me. Here were the good citizens of Prudhoe washing their dirty linen in public and in best Glasgow Edinburgh fashion it was a Hexham organ that was able to delight in our discomfort. The quality of argument in the letters was not especially good and rather it felt as if in the exhaustion of the saga mud slinging had become the last resort.

This then is what our landlord has achieved. The total division and polarisation of the community. It is not me who judges it thus. Read these letters in the Courant and make your own minds up. But I will clearly say why I think this had happened and should the Duke of Northumberland read this, I hope he will be hot under the collar. One man wields for the 21st. century an unusual amount of power in this town of 12,000. He is answerable to not one of us but he is the person who can set the tone of the new town centre. Here then is where our heading phrase comes from. When good is not good enough. My wife tells a tale of the institution where once she ran library services. A new supreme manager arrived. A department head had to speak to a proposal. He started out by saying "this is a good proposal". Before he went any further the boss interjected "that is not my style, good is not good enough for me, take it away and come back when it is excellent". A lot of pain followed this person's arrival at this institution but years later both the institution and that individual continue to thrive and gain recognition.

This should have been the story at Prudhoe. The plot was simple. A growing hillside town in Northumberland surrounded by woodland and beautiful landscape. One last green space left in the centre of the town. It would clearly face developmental pressure. The person who owned it has come to national prominence with the Alnwick Garden. Expecting that a marriage of the two would equal excellence is natural. But what Prudhoe is having foisted on it is just good. Would you even award good to the people who will be remembered for having built the first multi storey car park in Tynedale? Yes, not dug underground into a hillside but sprouting out from it in as prominent a place as you might imagine. Is it any wonder that aside from the business mechanics of this, aside from the supermarket rivalries (we already have a Co-Op superstore), aside from my gripe that we still will not have an independent butcher, aside from this, that what looks like something from the 1970s or 1980s, (perhaps from the Duke's Cramlington development?) translated to this magnificent hillside has succeeded in dividing the community? At the last count the town council voted against 4/3. There are many 1000s of objections lodged from a community of 12,500. It is a very sad situation and it could and should have been avoided. What would have done that is inspired leadership from the top. A thorough going committment to the Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe which would have left the community itching to see it happening instead of preparing for a Friday public brawl.

Passengers Go Away

2011-05-09T08:59:00.001-07:00

Seen at Prudhoe Station May 2011. Just about the worst case of an own goal one could imagine. Huge business opportunity enters the mill of railway bureaucracy to become passengers go away. So symptomatic of Britain in the 21st century bereft of enterprise at least in this industry. A much fuller and interactive discussion took place at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=144426282297802&set=a.137068286366935.31421.100001912940850&type=1&theater . Or try http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=316916&l=db39f6947e&id=100001912940850 .

Nene Valley Railway Edmondson tickets

2011-05-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know how to get issued NVR Edmondson tickets? Week before last I made a return journey from Ferry Meadows. The office was staffed and a large assortment of Edmondsons on view. I worked out that with myself and child I could get four different tickets. I explained to the clerk how much I wanted the tickets and was prepared for this more expensive option than a day rover. He took the money and still issued me a ticket from a pad with an Edmondson souvenir! I was furious.

Holiday on the Buses

2011-04-23T13:05:00.001-07:00

An evening of the on the buses films. If you want to be reminded of c1970 Essex just the stuff. The buses were Bristol KSWs from the Eastern National company. An OPC book called The Bristol KSW dated 1985 gives the exact details of the four vehicles used (plate 74). Holiday on the Buses came last and somehow or other I felt I had missed this previously. It is evidently filmed at Pontins Prestatyn and used a Crosville open top Bristol Lodekka. However for my tastes there is some extra-ordinary footage of storm tossed Sealink ferry. Clearly bought in and very dramatic. Was the vessel Holyhead Ferry 1 see http://www.sealink-holyhead.com/railway/ships/ferry1/home.html ? An answer to that does interest me.

Opencast Mines I have known

2011-04-04T00:46:00.001-07:00

Opencast mines I have known. Now there's a thought. This is the Glenmuckloch opencast near Kirkconnel which thanks to the Dumfries and Galloway Wildlife Festival, the good offices of ATH Resources and the GeoD group led by Diana Turner, I was fortunate enough to spend some hours in on Saturday past. With the mine's geologist and four keen Land Rover drivers from the workforce, our party explored the site from top to bottom. Once this was where the National Coal Board's Roger mines had worked which closed in 1980. This site started I believe in 2006. It excites a whole range of emotions. Wonder at the sheer technical ingenuity of it all. The geology is extremely complicated as the picture shows. The seams have come hard up against a volcanic dyke at the back of the site so the layers twist and turn and break and fault. A coal seam is prominent in the picture and it is anything but horizontal. Definite admiration then for those acheiving the job and who have also laid in Britain's longest conveyor to get the coal to a rail loading point so that lorries are not used outside the mine. There is also wonder and excitement at seeing the geology laid bare. Privilege at seeing something so rarely exposed. Sheer awe and fear too, partly at the creative forces exposed, partly at the sheer sight. It is a rare opportunity to wonder at the conjunction of nature and man's industry which creates a sublime vision. It is the sort of thing which inspired the Auden's, Blake's and Martin's of this world and which nowadays everyday Britain does not see so much of. Some might feel repugnance. The word exploitation crosses the mind. There is a huge price in man's addiction to fossil fuels and seeming unwillingness to exploit to the full all the endless sustainable energy around us. However on the opposite side of the Nith a new windfarm was hard at work. And in reviewing: were'nt we lucky with the weather? The conditions up here this last winter must have been abominable.

Whilst with opencasts and coal, I can quickly review past encounters. Opencasts have been officially visited at Chalmerston Ayrshire and Plenmeller Northumberland in the 1990s. They have been legally viewed from public highways most impressively near Widdrington shortly before said road through the middle of the site was closed and bullzozed away (Maiden's Farm OCS). As a public event this was right up there with a 1983 underground visit as part of Cumbria County Council's Guided Walk programme to Claerghyll Licensed Coal Mine near Alston. The scale of that could not have been more different.

Virtually seeing some of the Collection

2011-03-05T05:19:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a dual purpose post. It will appear in my twin blogs Robertatforsythe and Robert Forsythe blogs the National Railway Museum. Since the snow just before Christmas, I have been working Facebook and establishing various presences. You are invited to follow Robert Forsythe, Fiona Forsythe, Robertatforsythe and Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group (also Shepherds Dene for the Christian component).

Part of the task had been to allow a Facebook presence to serve as an introduction to the material at York. This has been accomplished by showcasing both duplicates and some solo pieces from the collection. Here is an album. A lot of what appears has either also been sold or is for sale (where we had multiple copies). There are still plenty of pieces looking for new homes so do check it out. I shall also remind folk of a very good appreciation of the collection. To close, as I was preparing this, I was reminded of some scans of a definite highlight of the collection. This was a brochure I bought from ebay quite soon before it all went to York. It is a corker and a couple of scans are here and here.

Big Catholic Buildings: Cork Lee Road

2011-02-17T07:11:00.000-08:00

What is it about Catholicism that it managed to build spectacularly large buildings? Structures which like Ushaw College are very difficult to handle in the 21st century. But here is one which can claim to top the lot: Our Lady's Hospital, up the Lee Road, Cork.

I found it because I am listening to a Gaelic Storm CD which has a spirited rendition of "Johnny Jump Up" and if you work at "up the Lee Road" and do some googling all is explained by this building. The railway enthusiast in me is taken by The Railwaymen's Bar at Youghal elsewhere on the track. Although HQ is in Northumberland I have reached Cork in the cause of train chasing but this building eluded me. Glimpsed from a train in 2008 was a similar structure outside Enniscorthy.

Save Chopwell Wood Sunday 13th February

2011-02-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

A really good turn out for the second Save Chopwell Wood Day of Action. They estimated 1,200 people. On the whole good speeches. But I felt that the Blaydon MP Dave Anderson was too old Labour. Talking about pit props 40 years since the collieries went, does it connect to young folk, of whom a lot turned out? What I did not hear was a simple answer to the obvious question? If you sell the woods, who will find the cash to buy them? The feckin banks. The bastards whose greed (a lot said about greed) got the nation into the mire will be the ones who end up owning our woods and putting up the keep out signs. I felt that was a message that needed to come over very loudly.

And this coming from someone who is not a great activist! I think I have done about four/five rallies in my past. An MP lobby c1985 on behalf of the World Development Movement to Westminster. Around the same time going to the Dales Rally led by Mike Harding to protest the planned closure of the Settle & Carlisle Railway and a couple of the Durham Miners Galas when I lived in the city. Today three of us went from Prudhoe in the car, myself, Fiona and friend Sarah. So to motivate me to get out in the rain does take a broad based issue which is beyond the pale. The sale of the Foresty Commission or of the National Nature Reserves is exactly that. Why are the national museums not being told to charge before the forests are sold? Why does not English Heritage review its property portfolio and hand out some of its absolute loss makers to local trusts? At least a ruin is unlikely to be appealing to a bank. And would be better off with a local trust or the National Trust. Again and again today the same message as was heard at Hexham on Friday came over. A community trust can help the Forestry Commission as it does now at Chopwell. But force it to take over and the task is far too big and specialist. After just a few years, like the employee sell out bus companies at privatisation, the wood or the bus company will be in the hands of a few big multi nationals.

An album of photos in a Facebook album at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=25774&id=100001912940850 .

Friends of Chopwell Woods own site. Their own Facebook page.

Another blog about the day is here.

Hexham Big Society Summit 11th February 2011

2011-02-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

My previous blog entry highlighted that I would be attending the Hexham Big Society Summit 11th February 2011. Inevitably perhaps I have to say something. It is not easy. I gave it 0930-1400 although a later timetable change saw it starting at 1000. I had to omit the afternoon sessions in the interests of child care. Maybe a rabbit was pulled from the bag, but I rather doubt it. I have no doubts about the enormous good will that was represented in the meeting. Nor in the interest; mid week I was told 100 people were coming. In the event there were 145 delegates and some stretching of the organisation thereby. Guy Opperman as MP did an excellent job in making clear that he was present as a constituency MP determined to listen and represent all views. A series of snapshot showcases of good practise were given. As many people remarked the Big Society is already well recognised in Tynedale. Huge numbers of people already give generously of their time. Community groups from Wylam, Prudhoe, Allendale, Tarset, Humshaugh, Bellingham and Hexham all came forward with heart warming tales of progress. But over it all hung the cuts and no clarity about how that might be solved. Time and again people gave chapter and verse about how the key partners volunteers needed in order to be effective are shutting up shop. The concrete tales of this were the Forestry Commission redundancies in Kielder, the Tyne Rivers Trust worried about The Environment Agency. Housing trusts and health campaigners all had actual tales of how volunteering was being adversely effected. I don't know what to say. Hours later and David Cameron was billed as doing a U turn over the Forests and then immediately Ken Clark was telling the middle classes they had seen nothing yet by way of cuts and that the economic situation of the country is calamitious. What can one say? I think the Big Society will struggle to be more than a fig leave over the pain. We will be left holding onto the Victorian author Samuel Smiles' Self Help or about the Roman Empire's retreat from Britain when it told the soldiers left here to look to themselves. A common thread for some anger was the unimpressive start that the new unitary authority has made. Northumberland Council in West Northumberland is no match for the Tynedale Council which worked geographically and actually. In a wonderful piece of sublimeal advertising which a county hack swiftly denied when he overheard me, the wallpaper for the Powerpoint projector consistently showed a "Putting People First Tynedale Council" image nearly two years after the district's abolition. Now, not far down the road, Guy Opperman is going to have to do some convincing that the existing constituency is retained despite the rough arithmetic suggesting Northumberland's present four MPs will become three? Democracy in Northumberland has not been well served of late and it is probably not surprising that a Northumbria Party has appeared.

Of prisoners, pirates and society.

2011-02-10T03:54:00.000-08:00

Three news items come together here. Today our MP will be voting over the prisoner vote issue. I sincerely hope his vote is cast with those who want no change. I passionately believe that those whose wrongdoing commits them to prison forfeit the democratic right. Of course as we all realise, the issue has become larger than itself. It is now about Europe and national sovereignty. I cannot think for one moment I want to be part of a union where such decisions are not left to national competence. It has become an eye opening example of the dangers of the European delusion. Hopefully the MPs will do the right thing and the government will persuade the court that this is not its affair. And if it cannot, then the jurisdiction of the court over our nation should be removed. I am not a fan of Europe, I studied Roman and Medieval History (when the Holy Roman Empire sought the same end). The nation state is the right scale for humans to work with. In our case the nation state that geography dictates is that of Britain, the British Isles. The four groups that make up Britain may of course rightfully have areas of devolution and even their own languages. But those who wish to destroy Britain are not those who have the interests of these islands as their priority. The proper appreciation of nationality comes when each of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish value their greater whole over their individuality. Yes, this means realising that English is the lingua franca of these islands and is also our greatest gift to the world. It means appreciating all our culture whether of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Burns or Yeats.

For me an essential component of being British is its religious heritage. Which is Christian and has been since the late Roman period. Arthur is a Christian hero and myth. Our Christianity may in part have come from Rome but even at the beginning it was mediated through the great Celtic tradition. A large element of Britishness is Celticness. We were always suspicious of Rome. Even the Irish once were. We made clear our national aspirations at the reformation. I often think of the Roman Catholic church and I weep. I know Christ commissioned Peter and gave him the keys. I know also Peter denied Christ thrice. Faith is nothing if not paradox. The paradox of the incarnate deity who is crucified and rises again. The paradox of the communion whereby at His instigation bread and wine become His body and blood. This is not cannibalism, it is paradox. The Tri-Une God, the marriage vow whereby 1+1 = either 1 or 3> but never 2; these are paradoxes. And faith cannot make sense unless you understand paradox. There is much paradox in being British, not least that we are tolerant and broadminded. I wish to respect those of other faiths in our nation but they have to understand that the British spirit of fair play is formed in our faith and our temperate landscape.

These things turned us into a mercantile nation which is natural for a group of islanders. Oh,we might have been better served if Liverpool had become our shared capital not short hop from the Continent London. Recently someone put it to me in great detail that the Devil entered into Roman Catholicism at the moment of the Constantinian settlement. Not such an outlandish idea. A lot of the old pagan order must have been subsumed into the new, privately vowing to put as much corrupt sand in the mechanism as they could. So ensuring that power took precedence over grace. Creating a church which would dominate private lives, denies its ministers the succour of women, denying its members the freedom to choose what they wished for their bodies. I may sound very conservative but can also be hugely liberal. Catholic one moment, Evangelical the next. I see contraception (but not almost all abortion)as an opportunity for grace. Gay relationships, gay priests, women priests, a woman pope; none of these would alarm me. Hedonism with some rules makes sense. The renaissance took place 500 years ago and still many Catholics deny reason and yearn for "their Latin past". I believe in reason (rational Biblical (and Koranic) Criticism), science, evolution and commerce. But not in unbridled capitalism or competition. Evolution may have required competition but in humans it has created beings who can reach beyond this. Who can see Grace is of God and thereby a society can grow which is not a slave of business, mere numbers or competitive urges.

Back to the news and this theme reflects two immediate matters. I heard today that Somali pirates hold 700 hostages and 36 ships. This is an affront to civilised life. One which at any time between 1800 and 1970, it is hard to see Britain standing idly by. Our commerce is threatened and thereby our interests. With other nations a far stronger response is needed for otherwise a whole nation has been handed over to criminality. Britishness would have demanded a response that rightly crushed the Somali pirates and in our loss of national identity it would appear we have lost the will to defend shipping.

Tomorrow in Hexham I shall attend our MP's meeting about The Big Society which relates to several of these themes. A friend said to me today for Big Society read Big Chaos. Those who are being expected to shoulder the burden of provision are the same organisations lined up to face local authority cuts. I wonder when we will all realise of whatever political ilk that a civilised society costs. It is not created by saying that selfish wealth creation and the market are the supreme end of man.

The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley

2011-02-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

The title is The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley. This is a page which will be a work in progress so keep checking back. Just got back home from a fascinating morning and the sun even came out. By 0830 I was casing the joint at Haltwhistle preparing for a Hadrian's Wall Heritage event.

At 1000 I was arriving at The Garden Station, Langley. This was to plan an event for the 2011 John Martin Festival. It is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our heading picture shows the old lead smelt mill flue in the woods. Clear as a path but actually all collapsed, imagine an arched roof covered in earth and with the arch now fallen into the flue. Some bits are intact however.

The date for your diary is Saturday 14th May from 1000 to 1600. John Martin was a painter heavily influenced by the industrial landscape and when a child growing up in Haydon Bridge, the nearby lead smelt mills at Langley would have been fully operational. Today Langley is a quiet hamlet and the evidence of its intense industrial past is cloaked in woodland. Seemingly innocent fishing lakes were once at the core of its power system. Our day will start in The Garden Station which last saw a train in 1950.

The draft timetable is:
1000-1020 Arrival and welcome.
1020-1120 A presentation by myself about Tynedale and Langley's industrial past and John Martin's industrial associations.
1120-1230 A walk to the old brickworks and Langley Dam lake.
1230-1330 Lunch available for you to purchase from The Garden Station's café.
1330-1530 A walk in the old smelt mill area seeing the remains of the flue and on up to the chimney.
1530-1600 Tea and wrap up.

Mention of wrap up: come well shod! And if the weather looks as if it might rain, make sure the waterproofs are in. The walks are not heavy grade but do require care about where to place your feet! The walk to the chimney on the moor is an ascentand is roughly a two mile round trip. The old chimney has been restored and those of you who follow my Auden interest will know that he was another artist who took inspiration from the industrial landscapes of the North Pennine dales. He certainly came to Allendale and wrote about the lead smelt mill, its flue and chimney at Allendale Town. He could have got there by train through Langley before the passenger service ceased in 1930. We can document that he visited Allendale before then (see 1924 poem Allendale).

Find out more about John Martin here.

Details about bookings will follow.

The L&YR and the ner

2011-02-06T06:35:00.000-08:00

This is something of a teaser requiring some railway history knowledge as well as the present day franchises: explain why thinking of the L&YR and the ner is pertinent. The capitalisation is the clue.

I placed that on my Facebook profile. This blog entry will be used to explain. L&Y stands historically for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. NER stood in history for either North Eastern Railway or British Railways North Eastern Region. Prior to 1923 the private companies were deadly rivals. This helped to ensure that the strong conurbations of Lancashire and Yorkshire were tied together which was a good thing but it also ensured the independence of North East England in railway matters. Today everything looks a bit different. I might suggest that it is quite appropriate to label the modern Northern Rail franchise the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Stand in Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds and you will see what I mean. Read up (as this blog has previously done) the investment plans for Northern. The conurbations of Lancashire and Yorkshire have triumphed through their Passenger Transport Authorities. And what of the North East. Divide and rule. One geographically small Passenger Transport Authority with only a handful of Network Rail stations but its own Metro to play with. Three weak shire counties plus the Tees Valley boroughs. No structure for a common voice in developing railway policy. And this is how the franchise to be let in 2013 for the North is being faced. A novelty for 2011 is a Tyne Wear Public Transport Users Group. Is this interested in examining the Northern franchise? Not as far as I can tell. It is more driven by the futile prospect of fighting the reletting of the East Coast franchise back into the private sector. If that francise is not relet then the whole private railway dream crumbles. Yet in effect North East England is just an island in the Northern empire. All the work of Heaton depot is isolated from other Northern operations. Setting up a North East Local Trains franchise would be relatively easy. No vast unpicking exercise. Last week the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet was on Tyneside. Did anyone mention the prospect of the new franchise. Was the question put and is anyone listening?

STOP PRESS: If the issue interests you, the Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group is holding an open meeting 7.30pm Hexham Community Centre 17th February 2011 to discuss the new franchise.

Multi-Culturalism

2011-02-05T00:41:00.001-08:00

David Cameron's speech on "muscular liberalism" in respect of the problems thrown up by Multi-Culturalism gets my accolade. It is high time that all of us in these islands appreciated the great benefits of being British and put the pleasures of being English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim into proper perspective.

Prudhoe Priest reads the last rites?

2011-01-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

The links I give below take one to a doom's day piece penned by Prudhoe's Roman Catholic priest. I don't think it has to be like this for either his congregation or anyone elses. My experience of the secular 21st century is that its members are desperate for grace. Families are being split apart in their inability to hear God's Word. We live in hard times but the gospel does bring joy. And I know I have seen that in congregations in the Tyne Valley both Anglican and Baptist to my personal knowledge. This is the link to the article. And here is another take on it including if you go far enough a comment from me.

Is the North Losing out on Transport?

2011-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

Check out
http://www.transporttimesevents.co.uk/conferences.php/Is-the-North-
Losing-Out-on-Transport-Promoting-Balanced-Economic-Growth-through-
Transport-Investment-25/

This would seem relevant to the North-East. Pipe up please if you are going to this from north of Darlington. Make no mistake the choice of location backs up everything I have said about a Northumbria franchise. It will be quicker to go to a meeting in London for Tynesiders than one in Manchester.

Look at the speaker list, I can find one North Eastern speaker 15:45 - 16:05 How can LEPs bring forward transport investment to support growth? Jonathan Spruce, Senior Assistant Director, Tees Valley Unlimited and that is an interesting topic. How many in the audience will be from the North East despite Philip Hammond doing the keynote.

Mark 4:25

2011-01-11T06:08:00.000-08:00

If you want to confront the fascinating detail of Bible translation and Jesus's morality this is very instructive http://bible.cc/mark/4-25.htm (You may need to realise, if you did not know, I have two Durham University degrees in theology although I struggle greatly with "church" religion (although not an iota of the extent to which I might struggle with another major religion which does not embrace critical study (meant in the academic sense))).

Ebchester Bank

2011-01-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

This would likely have not been written unless at 1335 on Tuesday 4th January I had chanced across http://sajshirazi.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-ask-impossible.html . A poem had been posted which started with
I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single-mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred, advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.

The sentiments were already present. For weeks now a mix of Auden Amor Loci, Elliot's Little Gidding and the two books I have on Mother Julian had filled my mind. The focus has been through the Hexham Society for Sacred Studies working through Jeff Astley's Christ and the Everyday. I had drawn the short straw for the December meeting to lead on Providence.

This morning I had taken a shopping trip to Consett. It had not been easy. At the Post Office despite my letter passing through the small letter slot, I had been advised to buy a large letter stamp because a machine might think it is too large!!!!! A society which has absolutely given itself to insanity is the cause of this. "It nearly did not pass through" the lady said, but it had passed through and that was all that mattered to me and all that should matter.

I was trying to buy a Wii controller for the daughter. Consett was not the right place to be after I had tried three likely shops. Consett seemed exceptionally full of rolling derelicts and house after house had half hanging guttering and no-one apparently doing anything. That in turn because Health and Society now probably demands a full suite of scaffording to repair a gutter. Thank you snow.

I retired hurt but not before the Carlton Bakery had delivered me a superb corned beef slice. Such precious commodity required somewhere suitable for its consumption. I drove down to the park at Ebchester's old station and there in suitable peace I ate my corned beef slice and listened on a CD to the choir of St Edmundbury Cathedral sing "Lo he comes with clouds descending".

My Skoda's interior soon became numinous. I was parked right at the intersections of the lines of history. Beside me I had just pulled off one of the most famous of Roman Roads, the Dere Street. Crossing it at ninety degrees behind my bumper was the old trackbed of the Blackhill Branch. Nowadays a very pleasant resort for leisure, a cycleway and path but once an artery of industry. Seen in retrospect an industriousness that lasted for just a blink of an eye and yet one which when I first glanced at it, few would have realised was doomed.

Place and landscape are so regularly sacramental to me and a few precious minutes in this car park, alone with only a choir for company was no exception. Last night we had watched Brian Cox on Stargazing. What had I learnt from him? That reality is ever more awful than we first conceive. The writer's of Genesis conceived an awful creation. Yet they hardly knew the start of it. They were wrong to think that the pain was the consequence of our misbehaviour and even more misguided to lay the blame on the temptress Eve even if sex can so easily play a role in our misdeamours.

The reality is that the more science unpacks about creation, the more violent and extreme it becomes. If there is a Living Universal Loving Creating God, his explanation for our existence in the face of such raging forces of such age has to be clever and neat. The Christian would say Incarnation and Resurrection are just that. They would add that the history of Christendom shows many authors who have understood that this is not matter of science or of theology but of love. Save that you understand the nature and mysteries of love, you cannot readily find a way to faith in Christ. It is a matter of passion and strangely the consideration of human passion may help you to understand how it is, that even in the face of immense creationary violence, one can still have faith in the loving God and submit to the wild and frightening ride that is life and death.

Ushaw College

2010-12-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

I am not a Roman Catholic, I am a Christian ( liberal Anglican). I have many RC friends and three decades ago was a Durham theology student. I have had a career in information and heritage including saving some very large buildings. The problem of Ushaw cannot be readily swept away. Far better to say: forward to new opportunities. How wonderful it would be to create a new hilltop Christian village from what is present. Make the farm into luxury dwellings respecting the architecture. Create a retirement complex offering security and a community. Retain a small seminary and Christian community running the church and the library. Create a undergraduate hall of residence for Durham University. Continue a successful conference operation. Go to the Handelsbank for a funding partner. Get out there and work with a broad cross section of people of good will to see that God has a future for Ushaw College as He was its Director in its past.

This blog explains more http://forestmurmurs.blogspot.com/ and there is a petition here http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ushaw/.

Possibly some good news at last here.

Go North East, Facebook and IID

2010-12-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

For 10 days now Facebook and Go North East have together forged a revolution in real time transport company information management in a crisis. Archiving this revolution is not easy.

Here is a significant post and an entry point:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/notes/go-north-east/go-north-easts-policy-on-moderating-facebook-posts-and-twitter-messages/458638036183

Go North East’s Policy on Moderating Facebook Posts and Twitter messages by Go North East on Monday, 06 December 2010 at 11:04

Go North East’s Facebook and Twitter pages are for the purposes of keeping customers informed and receiving customers’ feedback. It is largely un-moderated as we welcome feedback from all customers and want to hear all points of view including criticism of how we are doing if we don’t get something right in our service to customers. We will, however, remove posts that contain foul or abusive language, or which for other reasons are considered seriously inappropriate. This would include hoax incident reports for example.

During severe weather conditions or during other major incidents, Facebook and Twitter are proving an extremely valuable way of keeping customers informed. Our team works flat out to keep the information up to date, and we ask all Facebook and Twitter users not to waste their time and the time of other customers with mischievous or abusive posts. Our team can provide customers with a much better service if they are able to concentrate on providing service updates and answering as many genuine customer questions as possible.

We reserve the right to block Facebook accounts that are sources of abusive language or other inappropriate posts, and to report the account holder to Facebook. Such posts will be removed as quickly as possible by our team.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
And here are some insider comments from a day or so back
"Facebook up to 27.5k "likes" and 2.5 million (yes million)"views" according to their stats. Ran a short piece on the people behind it in 'discussion topics' which has produced some very nice feedback. It's very rewarding hearing how much of a difference it is genuinely making for people.

An ad agency (we are not a client, don't know them), called mhdpartnership today tweeted: Looks like @gonortheast is king of the bus service updates."

There are risks. GNE have run a very open house which exposes them to a degree of counter productive posts. Not everyone is responsible in using their freedom.

Where might GNE see this all landing? Here at The International Institute for Information Design

http://iiid.net/

and you will immediately see
6th IIID Expert Forum
Traffic & Transport Information Systems
Traffic, Transport and Social Media
How transport providers and mobility enablers can use social media to better communicate with their customers
8 - 9 September 2011, Wien/Vienna, Austria

An excellent case study methinks?

Trying to keep a town bus service

2010-12-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

Regulars around Prudhoe will know what a struggle it has been to keep a town bus service since the 603 was culled in a review around 2003. Here is one instalment in a campaign to try to keep things positive. You need to understand that since 7.11.10 a brand new attempt at a town service called 111 is being run by regional company Go North East on a commercial basis for one year. The text is a letter to our two county councillors that this town has.

Dear Neil and Bill

You are the two councillors responsible for Prudhoe to the county. Today I had cause to be at the top of Prudhoe for some while (Drawback area). As opposed to my last visit when the timetable cases displayed the old inaccurate 604 route timetable, now they display nothing. So someone has been around and done something but whoever it was could not even get hold of the 111 timetable out of the 11 leaflets, cut it out and glue it in place. That would be something and Town Councillor Duncan Couchman has arranged for that to happen in the Prudhoe Town Council noticeboard on Castle Road.

The 111 service passes the new county installed real time displays at St Marys but does not show on them. Along Castle Road and Castlefields there is I think no information at all. There are a few STOPS which do display correct information like at Interchange.

Despite the difficulties of the weather, what was required from the county was not rocket science. Just sticking the printed timetable up would have done. And we are now at one month on from the change.

What is clear to me is that the weather and the state of the estate roads in the town has utterly vindicated the company in their decision to split the 11 and 111. As for the evening services, the county could apply to the Local Sustainable Transport Fund for funding and issue a tender.

Obviously we cannot control the weather and it is unfortunate that just when the 111 would be really useful its operation has become very erratic. I guess not many passengers would be on its tally currently and in the circumstance it would not surprise me that unless something is done, we will face a situation in which in a year's time Prudhoe's town bus service has once and for all been lost. Because unless a service carries passengers it is not worth operating.

Can I also suggest that people from the county look at this
http://www.dumgal.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=2624

Every single route in that rural region has an up to date timetable easy to download as a PDF. Is this the situation with Northumberland?

I looked here
http://www.northumberland.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=1456#Timesandroutes

and no way does it match up.

Don't believe Radio Newcastle about Metrocentre trains

2010-12-03T00:21:00.000-08:00

For several days now, BBC Radio Newcastle have been broadcasting no trains Newcastle Metrocentre. This has been totally wrong and just now I rung "Call the radio news desk: 0191 244 1459" to try to convince them of what is actually happening.

The girl there was so unhelpful it was incredible and clearly has no knowledge of where the trains go. All she would do is parrot that the train company say this.

The problem is that if you say as they have, there are no trains between Newcastle and Metrocentre the users of the line assume this means a blockage for the Carlisle Hexham Newcastle trains because Metrocentre is between Newcastle and Hexham. The girl bluntly told me that the line was so blocked and that I was wasting her time and hung up.

I have checked here and know this is wrong http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/en/s/ldbboard/dep/PRU

I can tell you there are plenty of trains between Newcastle and Metrocentre this morning. Every train that does not stop terminate at Metrocentre is running.

When Northern tell you Newcastle Metrocentre is not running what it means is that the short Newcastle Metrocentre ONLY trains are not running. They have cancelled a number of trains which use a crossover at Metrocentre to turn round because of the danger of the crossover freezing. That is all that is happening.

If this effects you complain to Radio Newcastle to check it by looking at

http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/en/s/ldbboard/dep/MCE
That is all they have to do and then see how misleading the broadcast is. They simply HAVE to say Newcastle Metrocentre ONLY trains are cancelled. Metrocentre shops will not be pleased if the BBC broadcasts that they have no train service.

Ovingham Middle School Shut 3rd December

2010-12-02T23:08:00.000-08:00

I attach the closure notice from OMS today. I know they are trying very hard and I do not disagree with their logic. It is serious once the grit stops working. However reading through this I think it can be concluded that the County Council needed to deliver a much more sophisticated and intensive effort through the week if normal life was not to fail as it has. Hopefully come Monday, the Atlantic will have returned and the snow gone away not come back this winter?

http://ovinghammiddleschool.net/?p=1053
(06:55am – 03/12/2010)

Staff check e-mail at 7:30

The usual decision making process has been gone through. The deciding factors today were the following;

The snow that fell from early evening to around midnight has not yet been cleared. That snow is lying on frozen slush on the roads. When I spoke my plough/ gritter contact (who I may add has been a fantastic help since last Thursday and has called everything right in my opinion), he was defrosting the tractor he drives as the diesel was freezing. He was told that the road temperatures on the A69 was -13, at which temperature the salt has no effect. He described the roads on the lead up to school as treacherous.

The caretaker, who always battles through has given me the condition report around the school is that cars are getting stuck on any incline and actually polishing the ice as they slip.

Most school transport did not run yesterday. The ones that did are not keen to even try today.

Neighbouring schools are closed today.

Last night Mr Lakey, the Caretaker and I had to abandon our path clearing and gritting around the school because of the snow falling. At the moment, this grit is having no effect on the paths or the entrance to the car park.

I have judged that the risk is too great for pupils, parents and staff to travel this morning. I know that it is likely to be sunny later which means that the paths and roads will defrost, however I feel this will come too late.

I am very sorry for the inconvenience. Please see the note about volunteers- we are planning a community path dig on Sunday.

Look North 29.11.10 The bus that did'nt stop

2010-11-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the news bulletins of BBC Look North carried prominently a bus story which must have made viewers laugh and the bus company cringe.

The snow scene showed a main road, a lady who had walked from her village a mile. She was stood at a bus stop beside a dual carriageway. Along comes a little yellow bus branded Tynedale Links and it rushes past her in the fast lane. She is annoyed.

Do these things happen by co-incidence? I think not and here is the explanation of it all. The location is a bus stop on the A69 called Ovington Road Ends. The lady I am told used to work for the BBC and lives in Ovington. How else would a film crew co-incidentally get here and find a passenger? You try it.

The bus belongs to Go North East who have been doing remarkable things in the snow, see their Facebook pages to prove that. It was working a Hexham Newcastle 684 route. The bus stop the lady was on is a Hexham Newcastle 685 route. Big difference because this is where the two routes diverge. She was waiting for the wrong bus.

The problem arose because the 684 bus is usually always in the fast lane at this point as it proved to be, because it is about to turn right,a difficult task on this dual carriageway. It then goes to the villages of Ovington Ovingham and Wylam. Because of the snow there had been difficulties in serving the villages and buses had had to stay on the A69. The bus was in the usual outside lane so that the driver could assess whether he could indeed turn right and serve the villages. He decided he could not but neither was he in any save position to serve the passenger.

It looks like something of a set up job by the BBC and one is left asking whether the passenger has thought of ringing GNE in good time to tell the bus company there would be a passenger at the "wrong stop". With acknowledgements to folk on that very helpful Yahoo group Busesnortheast for information which filled in some of the gaps. The real villain in the piece is Northumberland County Council who have been unable or unwilling to clear bus routes despite which the bus company instead of sitting in their warm depots have come out to try to operate them. If this sounds unfair, spending some time in the cold at Prudhoe Interchange over the last few days most perfectly illustrates this. The nearby main road was drivable so the buses got here. The interchange and adjacent bus stops which is also public highway was ignored by the clearance teams and buses were frequently sticking.

The Media Phenomenon which is Go North East's Facebook pages

2010-11-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

A brief post which is a heads up to a media phenomenon deserving of recognition. Look at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=9544&id=100001912940850&saved#!/simplyGNE .As the snow cut in on Thursday, Fiona the wife who was already on Facebook persuaded me I had to join in order to follow the minute by minute account of what was happening out there. Managers, passengers, drivers all seemed to be contributing. At that moment there were some 5,400 liking the page. Just now there are 9,601. That is a phenomenon in four days. It shows to those who are sceptical how a social networking site can be positively used by a regional bus company to engage cost effectively with their customer base. So much better than the clunky hardware heavy route which the Council authorities seem interested in following. By that I mean the real time bus displays. Examples of these have been installed at taxpayers cost in Prudhoe. They only cover one route and that I am not convinced accurately. Other bus routes use the stops and are ignored.

A great timetable meets its maker

2010-10-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

Over at Transport_Timetables@yahoogroups.com , which I administer, a contact called Ralph Rawlinson has helpfully briefed us about the end of another of the great printed railway timetables of the world in this information rich and content weak e-world.
>
>Re your mention of the European timetable. Apologies if it has previously
>been reported here but the Thomas Cook Overseas Timetable will cease
>publication after the Nov/Dec 2010 edition. http://www.seat61.com/news.htm

I thank Ralph for this titbit. Despite the collection now being at York and with 1.11.10 being my birthday, the good wife set out today to the Newcastle Thomas Cook to buy one of these.

It turned out to be almost impossible. All sorts of hoops were put before her by the staff. Finally the lady on foreign exchange said she would try and order one but not before 10th November!

Have've we been here before? When you want to abandon something the first thing to do is to make it very difficult to procure.

Nonetheless it is the clear trend. Printed railway timetables are dead. Only the great obstinacy of the British has ended up with 2 (TSO and Middleton Press) where we had one. But worldwide, they're finished and those of us with shelfloads of the things can congratulate ourselves on our prescience and wonder how future historians will have a clue about what operated when on national railway networks in the year 2011.

There seems on the part of the operators an almost culpable disdain for what they do and a conviction that whatever it is, it is so horrible that all trace for posterity must be lost.
>. The country now has 7,055 km of high-speed
>railways in operation, ranking first in the world and by 2012 it will have a
>network of 13,000 km.
Perhaps it was just too painful to see that in print about China compared with the British achievement. Maybe some DfT mandarin has been having a quiet world in the ear of a Thomas Cook senior executive?

The Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe AKA Prudhoe Town centre Redevelopment

2010-10-29T10:18:00.001-07:00

"Write me two paragraphs outlining the 21st century nature of the Duke of Northumberland's intended revelopment of Prudhoe town centre"

"We'll demolish one small monstrosity and replace it with a huge one"

"That looks like something out of the 1970s"

"Landlordism at its worst"

"Where's the hanging gardens of Prudhoe?"

"Is that a car park I see from 10 miles away?"

"That's a nice traffic jam on Station Bank and its not even snowing"

"Where's the butchers?"

"Is this a hard or soft development?"

"Do you travel from Prudhoe to shop in Blaydon shopping precinct?"

"A smaller town centre which thrives is better than a larger one that does not"

"At long last Prudhoe is going to get something Hexham has'nt: a multi storey car park"

For perhaps half of our 20 years in Prudhoe, the issue of Prudhoe town centre has bubbled on. Maybe it is longer. Because at heart I am not a controversalist, I have kept my head down on this issue. On Friday 22nd October 2010, something happened which broke that.

Myself, my wife and a good friend attended a presentation about the Duke's plans. This was in the light of a Judicial Review having quashed the County Council's granting of planning permission previously. What I saw at this presentation left me dumbstruck. I could not conceive that after so much process, a landowner could ignore so much complaint and offer a project that was so unimaginative and behind the times.

So now we try to explain. The one liners above are good debating points and we would defend each. It is sad if some sound negative and personal but my understanding is that the Duke, the landowner, has never personally put himself before the people of Prudhoe in an attempt to create a project that delivered across the spread of agendas. His solution has been consistently impositional rather than inspirational and consensual. And therein lies the Problem.

Some folk have thought our comparison with Blaydon a bit mean. Actually we do go to Blaydon, they sell some nice cheap vegetables there but we don't go for the destination experience. It is very clear that the shopping precinct there has drained life from the old Front Street whilst at the same time, the rate of unit turnover within shows it struggles with its own economies.

It ought to have been straightforward for a family with the wealth of the Duke of Northumberland and with the track record of Alnwick Garden to come up with the creativity, that when offered a prime hillside location in a beautiful valley, the resulting proposal wowed the mind and delighted the senses. A car park could have become a leading piece of vertical gardening or farming which brought people hundreds of miles to Prudhoe to see the result. A landmark which made every traveller on the A69 turn for the colour of the planting rising into the sky.

But throughout the whole torrid process that is the Prudhoe redevelopment, this connectivity between the talents that the Percy family evidently have and those charged with exciting the citizens of Prudhoe has been signally absent. Instead it looks as if the assumption is: that so long as there is a Sainsbury (which I would welcome), then that will please those who live in Prudhoe. We who live here are not people with aspirations, we will take what we are given and be grateful. Yet the reaction of the folk of Prudhoe has shown how wrong that assumption is.

Aside from the failure of the grand vision, it seems listening to the people at the presentation that there are plenty of serious everyday concerns. They have been heard before: how will Station Bank function. The paperwork handed out offered a bland assurance that there is no problem. There's the drains and the inhabitants of Castlefield. There are plenty of other issues but what personally gets me is the subtlety of the language of the information sheet I was handed. It offered a mix of non-food and food units. It did not make clear that THE food unit is Sainsbury and as I understand what I have read, if I asked to open a butcher in one of the other units, I would be shown the door.

The lack of a butcher in Prudhoe shows the tragedy of all this. We live in one of the most meaty counties in England. There are wonderful butchers in Hexham, Corbridge, Brampton and in farms not so far away from Prudhoe - if you have a car. Yet for about 18 years I think, the only butcher meat vended in a town of 12,000 has come from the Co-Op. We regularly buy our meat in Galloway, or from Wishart of Greenside, whose van we have persuaded to reach Lime Grove.

The Duke of Northumberland wields perhaps the balance of power in Prudhoe and above all else it is sad that there is such a disjunction between what the town really needs and what its owner thinks is good for it. What is the way forward?

A range of routes are possible. The Duke could recognise that his impositional solution to the Town Centre is extremely unpopular in this community. At the far extreme,the entire project could be withdrawn voluntarily and the land offered at market value to Prudhoe Community Partnership. The PCP would then fundraise to buy the land and then as a proper community venture the redevelopment should be planned to properly reflect the aspirations of those who live in the community.

Another solution would be for the Duke to withdraw wholly the present scheme and restart with something like these thoughts in mind. These start with Page 7 of Friday 22nd October 2010's Hexham Courant which should be looked at. Bardon Mill's planned village hall. How exciting, contemporary and how green can you go? And designed by a North East Architect. Why has not this been the style for a new development proposed for this hillside here? Why are we building up brick and concrete structures high on a hillside looking down on new estates and visible for miles? We have a sloping hillside so why are we not building into it. Why does'nt the facade of all the development look out to the north in a series of terraces? Why is'nt the car parking underground at the south side of the development?

Town centre developments have been done like this. Edinburgh Tourist Office is in one. Here's another
http://www.themall.co.uk/my-mall/norwich/index.aspx
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/castlemalldevelopment.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/funstuff/360/castle_mall_360.shtml

Norwich Castle Mall put underground right beside Norwich Castle. It could hardly have been a more sensitive sight.

So let's entirely rethink the whole Town Centre proposal. Let's only have one storey max above ground, let's get the vehicles underground from an access/exit on Front Street (down one access, up the next), and let's have nothing on Station Bank. Let's excavate large holes (Thompson's would be good for that) and then backfill them to create the spaces. Let's have a small one storey building area where the car park, legion and old dairy buidings are. Let them be traditional in feel. There's a town square. Let there be escalator entrances leading underground from here, and perhaps a T shape on two levels is envisaged. The walkway is in the middle of the vertical element of the T and on the south inside face of the cross of the T. This T shaped development spreads down and across the hill. All you see from outside is glittering glass and vegetation. Each unit domestic, residential or offices faces east, west or north from the T. The whole is covered in grass or vegetation on top. It use solar panels and strives to be energy neutral. The storm drainage could be used to generate power. I wonder what the energy designs of the current project are?

There's the grand design for Prudhoe. And you call it the Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe and it puts Prudhoe on the map of Britain. The name is so important and another evidence regarding the failure of the current proposal. These have no grand vision despite the site and are entirely mediocre (cf Cramlington Towncentre from the same stable, but at least that is not visible for miles away presenting a car park jutting out of a hillside with side aspect brick facades reminscent of a jail). A key name for the project should have been there from the outset, controlling what was going to come, and exciting the community.
___________________________________________

The reality of course is that landowners wield a huge amount of power. I am not anti-landowner but would wish anyone in that position to reckon with being a steward for what they have under the judgement of God. Pragmaticism realises that the community of Prudhoe has fought this very hard and unless prepared for more bitter struggle may have to compromise. There follow a series of bullet points inspired from the Environmental Statement. They include specific references to how the present development could be greened with what is already proposed:

Bullet points to show this:

1 That car park North Facade should be intensively presented with a soft face. This could be something like the B&Q gardens at Scotswood. It could be a community orchard terraced up the side of the car park. There is plenty of expertise available locally to advise on community orchards. Their proponents were at Hexham Farmer's Market on Satuday. (As currently planned, there must be every likelihood that this car park will become notorious as one the coldest and windiest multi stories in the UK).

2 It seemed to me most if not all of the structural facings are in brick? Have I got that right? Where is the variety? Throughout the development a range of facings could be employed. Faience, terracotta, tilling (where is the tiled Tyneside pub in this?), local stone, art deco, 1930's streamlining like the Belvedere Whitley Bay or a Burtons. A whole range of motifs are out there which if you promised them to the citizens of Prudhoe would show that something original was happening. Prudhoe is in fact a mix at present and my hunch is that people like that variety and mix.

3 It is not just requiring a variety of facings, but the softening agenda could also be futuristic. There is case for looking closely at how much hydroponical gardening or farming could be worked into all this, both the buildings and the retaining walls and sound barriers. Soft vegetation absorbs sound.

I know that new thinking comes with risk but if the objective is that Prudhoe becomes a destination, you link Alnwick Garden, hydroponics and this hillside here and you offer something really different. Something potential office renters will say ,we want to be in Prudhoe to be part of this. Otherwise Viscount Allendale's farm conversions for offices in neighbouring parishes are far more attractive and contemporary.

If Hydroponics is fresh to the reader here are some more urls:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/29/vertical-farms-urban-food
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
http://www.valcent.eu/
http://www.simply-hydroponics.com/103/vertical-farming/
and more at Gardening and the visual
http://www.green-walls.co.uk/?gclid=CL7Eh_a57aQCFdv92Aod8H2c1g
http://www.1-hydroponics.co.uk/miscellaneous/hydroponic-vertical-garden.html
(these ones really show what I could enjoy)

There is a heading in the ES about Ecology and that should be utterly full of the above. It is empty in the statement. It should be boasting about how the new development contributes.

4 Transport is green. I am not satisfied with the comments in the summary under Traffic and Transportation. It fascinates me to know when the studies were done on Prudhoe Station Bank. Yes at time it is quite quiet, at other times it is a disgrace to what motor vehicles do to a community. I cannot begin to see how at school times and peak hours and in poor weather Station Bank will not be a nightmare with this proposal. There is absolutely no mention of the bus services. Are the existing stops to be used? Will bus users walk to the development? Are there route diversions and new stops planned? Have Go Ahead North East and the public transport team at County Hall been consulted?

5 Finally to engage the community and to be 21st century, there should be a website on which all the plans are visible. The idea that a few hard copies of intimidating documentation are deposited in a library and that this is consultation is not acceptable nowadays. A website showing exactly how the proposal will sit in the landscape and allowing the viewer to virtually walk through the development should have been practical at any point since 2000.

Tea Rooms of East Tynedale

2010-10-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

For a very long time the tearoom, like the garden or the church, has been sacred space in our lives. The cheese scone if not the object of worship is certainly sacramental, as north of the Border is the oatcake. One or two folk knowing our predilections suggested that we really should blog on the subject. Where to start? More importantly, where to stop? The next few paragraphs with a few stretches will focus on East Tynedale from Hexham to Wylam and a semi circular thrust south out to Consett and Allendale.

Starting just over the border in Gateshead is Bradley Gardens. A wonderfully restored walled garden with many plants for sale. A substantial thread of sculpture. The tearoom is in former greenhouses set against a south facing wall. Very comfortable with newspapers. Easy to linger. A view out to an enormous almost Devon like hillside. Slightly expensive and a top endish menu. Also a sense of being child unfriendly. Despite those apparent reservations, so long as you don't have an army of children in tow and you do enjoy the finer things of life, this is a very pleasurable place.

Wylam Tea Room: has recently moved though the management remains the same. Have not visited the new location which is near the Renault dealership. The old one although small and at the back of an excellent deli was good value, good for craic and I can still taste the bacon sarnies.

The Hearth Horsley is notable for its arts and crafts connection. The village site has extensive views, is very accessible from Newcastle.

Now entering our hometown of Prudhoe. Whilst not renowned as a destination nowadays there are several worthwhile meeting spots. Waterworld has since its opening in 1990 offered a cafe and for a good while was the only pleasant cafe style in the town. It now has rivals but it still remains a friendly definitely child centred eatery and is good value for money. It is called Cafe@leisure.

The Manors is a retirement home opened in 2010 in Prudhoe and which advertises its cafe forcefully. Not yet sampled.

Balls of Prudhoe. An award winning fish and chip shop which in September 2010 opened next door a tea room/restaurant. Small and will get very popular is our take. But delightfully furnished, personal service from the proprietors. Plenty of laughter. Varied menu from tea and cake to very generous helpings of British classics. You don't have to have chips with everything. The toilet is a hoot worth travelling miles for. The placemats certainly inspire conversation too.

Moving down the street to Prudhoe's Corner Cafe. The most obvious place for tea or coffee in the centre of Prudhoe. Recently refurbished c2008. Straightforward, reasonable and reliable. Plate pies, mince, corned beef etc. We have enough confidence in the offer that we will take guests here for a working lunch.

Just to the west of the town is the spectacularly located Valley View Cafe at the Tyne Valley Garden Centre. Newly refurbished in 2010, the offer is very pleasant and the high level view over the valley quite exceptional.

Jiggery Pokery Mickley. Only a few yards on up the A695, this is one of our all time favourites. Sadly Pamela and John Jewitt no longer operate it. John has passed on. The slight edge of its excellence is gone but it is a very good tea rooms nonetheless. Towering cakes. Mouthwatering cheese scones? Is John's touch - for he used to personally make them - of a nick of mustard in the mix still employed?

Continuing west to Riding Mill, this is a community without a tea rooms. However tea and cake in an exceptional location can be procured. Up the Slaley Road is Shepherds Dene. This Arts and Crafts House has since 1946 been the Newcastle Anglican Diocesan Retreat House. Generally speaking even casual visitors will find a warm welcome and tea and home made cake in the wooden pannelled dining room overlooking the valley is an experience of its own. The more so if prayer is something that does not frighten you.

As Shepherd's Dene is south of the A695 and the main Tyne Valley we now continue an exucursion south towards the Derwent and Allen Valley catchments. Up Apperley Dene is Wheelbirks Ice Cream Parlour. For many years we have enjoyed Wheelbirks farm for its green top milk and ice cream from a Jersey herd. The Quaker heritage of the estate is also notable. In 2009 a major investment opened an ice cream parlour alias a ice creamed theme tea room. It is especially comfortable and the website very informative. The ice cream is something the cognoscenti will rave about. There is plenty of information about the history of the farm. The setting is very pleasant high up this north facing side valley. I am glad to see children's parties of all ages are welcomed. That was not the case earlier in 2010 when we tried to locate Clare's 10th birthday celebration there. In the event we moved a mile down valley to Broomley Grange, a Boys Brigade activity centre. Their adventure course contains elements of high drama and ingenuity: the stream walk, the very long zip wire and the tunnel maze. Rounded off with a hearty tea for the kids, but not quite a tea room unless you go for the Christmas fair.

From Wheelbirks the road runs south along a Roman alignment to Ebchester. It passes the Highland Cattle Farm with tea rooms and then over the summit and down to the Derwent Valley, and on the left is The Herb Patch at Newlands. Definitely in a particularly favoured category. David and Linda here are a couple to admire. This is a not so common example of a flourishing smallholding. The tea room itself is a simple wooden building with a "green" shop attached. The fare is excellent and the welcome warm but the chance to buy herbs or let the children meet sheep, geese, rabbits and cows is the extra. An interesting programme of short courses is also promoted. The very enjoyable venue for a couple of Clare's birthday parties.

The River Derwent is crossed and so to County Durham. We will not be here too long but the opportunity to sample two linked tea rooms cannot be missed. The link is the long established Durham cycleways on old railways. One of these is now part of the c2c route and there are two tea rooms established on the route. Just outside Consett is the Howns Gill Farm Tea Rooms hard by the cycleway. Another recent addition, the food is straightforward rather than exotic, the welcome warm, the view excellent. It is especially favoured by cyclists and the offer could be seen as pointed to them. The result is that it is exceedingly reasonably priced.

Continuing along the cycleway or the nearly parallel moorland road, the views ever increase. The Scottish Border Hills and the North Sea as far as Hunt Cliff in Cleveland will be seen on a clear day. Just over the top and facing Weardale, was once an extra-ordinarily remote railway junction. It last saw trains in 1969. This is Parkhead Station. There is a tale of more personal endeavour here from Terry & Lorraine Turnbull. When we first patronised the establishment, they were operating from a caravan whilst the stone built station was gutted and rebuilt. There is car parking and walks and rides galore start here. It can be very cold, very windy and completely snowbound. An open all hours mentality prevails and whilst the soup and bacon baps are hardy favourites, something more sophisticated is available for those who stay the night. And what a place for a stranger to the North Pennines to stay the night.

An adjacent road junction to Parkhead Station allows us to turn back into the Derwent catchment and so to The White Monk Blanchland. Blanchland is small but picture postcard in quality. A stone village around an old monastery set deep in the headwaters of the Derwent Valley. The Lord Crewe Arms is the prime hostelry and our poet of study W. H. Auden stayed here. But for tea room fare, there is one candidate which is The White Monk. It has moved location and is now in the former school. It is very popular and can get very busy but if you come to this lovely village and require tea, you will be drawn here and it should be enjoyable.

Mr Auden moved with ease and great pleasure around the valleys of the North Pennines. For him Blanchland, Rookhope, Allendale, Nenthead and Alston Moor became part of a sacred landscape. You will not find it easy to find too much about this on the ground but the next valley to the Derwent west is Allendale. His poetry wrote about the lead smelt mills which tower above Allendale Town. These were flued to a smelt mill in the valley bottom. Here the ruins have been redeveloped as the Allen Mill.

Thus to the Allendale Bakery at the old Lead Smelter: A recent opening (in 2009) when we visited in October 2010. A nice conversion of old lead smelt mill buildings with interesting other units. The whole called Allen Mill. The bread is outstanding as is the website which made us visit. Plenty of nice wooden games for the children and when we partook a rather unexpected and exciting exhibition of bespoke corsetry. The site as a whole is not yet complete. Car parking is a bit hardcore. Very nice walks from the site but be cautious of leaving your car too long as it does get locked.

Up in the town is the Allendale Town Tea Rooms. Since we lived here for a couple of months in 1990 when moving from Scotland this is bound to get our attention. Refurbishment, probably several times and new owners since then. This is a traditional tea room in the centre of the town square. Very much a hub of life. The Sunday Roasts are very popular and very reasonable. Like going back to the best of the 1950s.

Right at the head of the Allen Valley is the Allenheads Tea Rooms in the Hemmel. I have a memory of a friend's birthday party here with the most prodigious amount of profiteroles. The tea room is usually very nice and passes the cheese scone test. Over the long period I have known it, its remote location at the head of a lonely valley has seen numerous business viscissitudes. The mine site all about is fascinating and car parking is adjacent. Incidentally the link profiles a number of further tea rooms to the south of us and they include more of our favourites like Eggleston Gardens.

Returning now to the Tyne Valley proper and imagining ourselves crossing Ovingham Bridge, we pass the next village of Ovington. Unfortunately Winships there which was for a while a community tearoom and excellent at that, is now purely a restaurant and somewhat limited in opening at that. There follow two excellent farm shops both offering refreshments. The first is North Acomb which is slightly tucked away off the A69. It has wonderful views and good walks from the venue, indeed a walk there and back from Ovingham is very pleasant. Primarily it is a butchers and very good at that. Hot drinks are available and there are so many cakes and pies for sale that an impromptu meal is easy. Very pleasant with Fentimans fizzy drinks sat on the grass verge outside watching the lambs at play in early summer. The sun dried tomatoes will go well with their cold meats and cheeses on oatcakes. There is plenty of choice of (live) animals to watch. Great for chidren.

Only a mile or so on from North Acomb and at the Styford roundabout where A69 and A68 intersect is Brockbushes farm shop and tearoom. This is very well known and very busy. In summer it fills with PYO. The tea room is sizeable and needs to be. The cakes are on the grand scale. All sorts of things in the farm shop but usually there are cheaper outlets around for all this. It is priced after the captive passing trade.

From here it is easy to reach the line of Hadrian's Wall and with recent initiatives like the Hadrian's Wall Path there is a constant succession of venues west. We will not cross the North Tyne at Chollerford although two tea rooms are only over the bridge and there is also the remarkable Simonburn tea room in a post office a few miles further up that valley and in a decidely off the beaten track estate village. Has served us a wonderful turkey dinner in the fast.

Instead we retire east along the old military road. At the top of the big Brunton bank there is St Oswalds Tea Room. Situate in a farm, this is definitely farmhouse fare. Not quite so farmhouse but on a farm nonetheless is the Vallum Farm Tea Room. Here the feel in a new and generously proportioned wooden building is contemporary in structure and fare.

Our last call is tucked away a mile north of the wall alignment and is the High House Farm Brewery Tea Room at Matfen. An excellent and original adaption of old farm buildings to produce a broader plate with which to enjoy the prime product of the operation.

That's it for now but we have not tackled:
Hexham: so much choice in Hexham that we have not even started to review them. If you are feeling pious and it is not the depth of winter, you might try the Abbey Tea Room for simple economic fare in a stony vaulted setting. The same response of generous provision applies to Corbridge.

Reading this, you might feel there is not quite enough about the food or the tea. They are very important and you can assume a location is not listed unless it is tasty. You can also consider that a key criteria for our private judgement will be the quality of the cheese scone or the corned beef pie. However once the food and drink past muster, next in our criteria will be issues, like comfort, view, history, the craic. A tea room visit has to convey a sense of heaven to us, it has to be wholesome experience in the round. One that we carry into eternity.

Remember to check back here as there is every chance this page will change as we travel around.

Westward Bound opens a new shop

2010-10-21T07:57:00.001-07:00

Friends who know both of us well or study the bookshelves know that all sorts of facets of life interest. One of my heroes was the Reverend Teddy Boston. He was a saint for sure (miracles and all). A noted railway enthusiast, very fond of eating and with a significant collection of horror films. Horror has never been our dish but in my family background there is no little connection to the Bohemian past in British society. In this context we have followed the comings and goings of a Plymouth fashion house (which sadly we have never visited) called Westward Bound over many years. Just recently a new and sumptuous showroom has opened. Their write up is a corker worth quoting. Note especially the use of religious guilt:
"The major influence in the creation of our showroom being the
sumptuous style of Parisian and Milanese fashion houses of the
1950's; these stimuli have been fused with facets of Vivienne
Westwood, Louis XVI and religious guilt to create a unique and
sumptuous space".

York Northern Timetable Development Stakeholder Workshop 23.9.2010

2010-09-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

Robert Forsythe attended this on behalf of Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group . These comments however are made personally. It turned out that this was a significant and well attended meeting. Northern were looking for contributions for improvements over the rest of the franchise to September 2013, and then for something called CP4 and then for the possibility of bidding for the new franchise after 2013 which they hope would be a longer 15-20 year franchise.

The write down wish list firmly noted our contribution in respect of "timetables" (stock, marketing, and ticket machines were not in this), that following the improvements we want no regression and that the gaps into both Newcastle and Carlisle in the morning peaks could be plugged. The detail of the availability of a set was flagged. Both Gilsland and Blaydon were got onto the board as aspirations.

There was quite a discussion over regularly overcrowded trains and why further sets were not procured. Truly terrible daily horror stories throughout Northern were being recounted. Every day the 0824 from Denby Dale is a disgrace. The Sunday Bishop Auckland Whitby, this summer's innovation, was apparently week after week reaching Middlesbrough full and not uploading anyone there! There were people stating that 300 people were leaving a Class 156 at Whitby. Northern did not disagree but nor did they offer any solution. Expect overcrowded services to the Northumberland County Show and on Newcastle Match Days to continue with only tweaks to alleviate.

They asserted bluntly that nothing makes money and because a train is full and we say run an extra or couple another set, their answer is that the loss is simply increased. Bluntly, the more people who wish to travel by train, the more the railway will cost the nation. Only Intercity routes make money, not a single Northern service does. This they were categoric and public about this.

I think something new was learnt. It is not just about leasing extra sets. There is something more subtle. They lease these trains for a set number of hours or miles in a year from the ROSCO. It is in their interest to schedule them to the highest possible point and not a mite beyond because at that point hefty penalties are imposed. This means the problems are mainly driven by the leasing regime and not the true availability or otherwise of stock and staff. Possibly with a longer franchise Northern would press to obtain stock differently.

Something else was learnt about the rewrite of Part D of the Network Code. Currently a timetable change of any consequence takes 40 weeks to implement. Network Rail want to change this to 55 weeks.

A slide showed new signalling schemes in the Northern area. No mention of the Tyne Valley. I quizzed this. The Northern staff present were emphatic they had no knowledge of any scheme for further resignalling in the Tyne Valley. This could be questioned. I am not utterly confident. Network Rail might have missed these boys out!

A lot of time and space was given to what was the Manchester rail hub, now the Northern rail hub. Northern are pinning a lot on North Western electrification in the near future. Liverpool Manchester Blackpool. They see this as essential in that area and that by stock cascading it will help elsewhere. Accordingly the PTEs were well represented but no-one from Nexus.

My judgement is that whilst they will do what they can for the North East, we are quite marginal to their overall operation. The likes of Belford, Ashington, Whitby and Hexham are interesting but are way down the pile of Northern's priorities. The PTE routes in York and Lancs are the real force.

The meeting as a whole complimented Northern. A lot of good ideas were going onto the wish list including line re-openings like Ashington and Colne Skipton. A station for Peterlee was noted. Compared to Arriva and Northern Spirit, everyone likes Northern and the people running it. They try very hard and offer a really good lunch.

But don't get too blinded. If Northern gets a really long franchise, then throughout that franchise, Northumbria will be on the margins. Everyone involved as stakeholders in the North East including politicians should dwell on this. Is that the situation to run with for 15+ years? Reflect that Northern in Northumbria (border Darlington Carlisle Berwick, the Heaton depot duties) is virtually an operating island. A free thinker would say that if the politicians would grab the issue a better deal for the North East might come from a Northumbrian local trains franchise handling everything in those borders. It is quite a few routes: Tyne Valley, Northumberland Coast, Saltburn Bishop, Esk Valley, Durham Coast and potentially Ashington and Leamside. There is also the interaction with the Tyne Wear Metro, North York Moors and Weardale Railways. But to achieve that, action would have to be taken now or else the refranchise operation will roll forwards soon and we will have to accept crumbs rather than any concentrated ability to tailor things with the North East prominent.

Luxury Tour Trains

2010-09-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

It is some time since I have made an offering to the blog and on this occasion I realise my listings are building up quite an assortment around the Luxury Tour train theme. In Britain back before World War Two the LNER started this concept with The Northern Belle. When the CIWL worked Orient Express came to an end James Sherwood of Sea Containers revived it as a luxury tour train. This called the VSOE has become very successful and in Britain it is partnered by a revived Golden Arrow. Since these started around 1982 all sorts of operators across the world have entered the field. Some have come and gone quickly like Al Andalus. Canada contributes The Rocky Mountaineer. In South Africa there is Rovos Rail. Many will play with the Pullman theme as the very shortlived Eddie Stobart train did. I think careful searching of my lots will find more on these themes and for sure anyone contacting me will be able to persuade me to scurry through the boxes and find some more material to upload.

There is being offered by another vendor on Specialist Auctions a lot which had me head scratching. The key to unlocking the lot is here. And the lot is here. Quite a sum of money is being sought but if Intraflug's/ Albert Glatt's version of the Orient Express appeals, you could look into this.

(my latest post on What's New at Specialist Auctions).

Reached 50 and reached Killhope Cross

2009-11-02T03:29:00.000-08:00

(PICTURES, done in reverse, first two Killhope Cross, next two coming to Cowshill, last yours truly (left) with Chris Phipps). Yes, folks, the long held ambitions of certain members of the erstwhile DUGIA (Durham University Group for Industrial Archaeology) were fulfilled on Saturday 31st October 2009. Despite many hours over the 1970s/80s/90s being spent chasing and occasionally riding Weardale Motors Leyland Titans, not one of us had managed a Leyland Titan ride over Killhope Cross between Weardale and Alston. This punishing climb has only occasionally enjoyed stage service. My 50th birthday (1st November 1959) bash and the co-operation of Dreadnought Coaches enabled this to happen. The original intention had been to use Bristol Lodekka XSL 228A of 1961. A before dawn hiccup meant this had to be replaced by 1952 Preston Corporation Leyland Titan PRN 761. Both are detailed at http://www.dreadnoughtcoaches.co.uk/main/index.php/gallery/fleet . The Titan was very similar in outline to Weardale Motors vehicles like ex Warrington BED 732C. Heads were turned in Weardale. The Lodekka would have been my sentimental choice as I grew up in East Anglia. Previous posts outlined the route we followed. Granted a 30 minute late start at Newcastle Central, everything else went to plan. Weardale put on its autumn best. The climbs from Cowshill, up the Killhope Burn to the Cross are punishing and the bus did it with extensive use of first gear. We were not utterly fully laden and there were numerous children. This was perhaps just as well. A breather was taken at the summit 2056' ASL. Auden's The Watershed was read beside the stone cross to which it refers. It was then onto Alston for lunch and South Tynedale Railway train rides behind Helen Kathryn. More tough driving followed in the dark over Whitfield Moor and the hairpins at Staward in Allendale. A good singsong took place with Hot Asphalt, Jerusalem and I Vow to Thee My Country along with The Wheels on the Bus being belted out. Thank you Andy Clarke and Rod Donaldson for bringing along the guitars. Two hours were enjoyed with a Pennine party tea in Stocksfield Institute catered for by the ladies of the Snod's Edge Church Hall Sunday Afternoon Teas. Our chosen charities were Tiny Lives, Sarnelli House and Tynedale Hospice, all benefitted (to the tune of £783). Thanks for all who turned out and especially Mr and Mrs Fuller of Dreadnought for looking after us on the day.

The Newcastle Journal have written the day up at
http://www.journallive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-news/2009/11/02/birthday-is-a-real-busman-s-holiday-for-robert-forsythe-61634-25068330/ . Two nice photos are in the printed version.

Here's to the next hire!

Nearing 50

2009-10-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

This bit of blogging has not seen much activity lately. That has been concentrated on http://forsytheonthenrm.blogspot.com/ . The more personal bit of our lives has not been idle though. We are in the countdown to being 50. What a bind especially when the medics tell you it is a good time to start taking insulin for Type 2 diabetes. All the cream cakes of youth catching up with one. However "To Drive the Cold Winter Away" (Loreena McKennitt, how I would like to meet her (although the three of us did meet other musical heroes a fortnight ago when we heard Gaberlunzie perform in a Kirkcudbridght pub - they were good, 21 years older than when I had booked Robin and Gordon at the Scottish Maritime Museum, they are now practically old but they can still sing, Gordon did a stentorian unaccompanied rendering of Burn's Such a Parcel of Rogues, quite different to what they've recorded and quite brilliant)), we've arranged a 50th bash. I apologise for the double brackets in the foregoing. Not brilliant English but did you ever read F. D. Maurice's theology? One of my heroes. He had sentences which exceeded a page in length. I do tend to offer something like a Ronnie Corbett Shaggy Dog Story when let loose. I remember I could never ever listen to an entire one of his as they physically made me sweat.

Back to the main thread. We are nearly fifty. I am an autumnal child. It was Bishop Richard Holloway, himself a November child, who spoke of the Gentle Melancholy of Autumn. I think a lot can be understood in my own life by remembering that I am a Scorpio born in November in Norwich in the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital (not the new one which has a worrying reputation and to all intents and purpose saw off my beloved mother by not diagnosing Peritonitis within three days). And when all the details of my birth on 1st November 1959 are appreciated even more is understood. For whilst we may not be able to describe the exact moment of our birth, I have no doubts we remember it well. And the conversations we have had with our own daughter Clare born very premature in 2000 confirm this for us.

We digress yet again. I wanted to put down here what we've arranged for the 31st October. We have very many friends and acquaintances. Sadly we could not invite everyone. If you've not received the invite, sorry. But in three respects you can still join in. Those who wanted to chase the antique bus on its jaunt through the Pennines could. Yes, that's what we're doing, hiring a bus. Google Dreadnought XSL and you will find it. We're also having a ride on the South Tynedale Railway on public trains so we could see you. However access to the bus itself and to the party is strictly controlled. We have no room for gatecrashers and will spot any a mile away!

So here is the broader information. It is a for charity do and generous hearts who are prepared to donate to the good causes even if not coming on the bus or getting to the party will have their heavenly reward! Those who know me well will get all the "connections". Durham, the North Pennines, Auden, old railways and buses (a Lowestoft Lodekka (childhood)), Tynedale, Churches and the spirit & Farmhouse/Chapel Teas. Heavenly.

Robert Forsythe at 50 update and Boarding Instructions master

Dear

An update about the 31st October / 1st November Robert reaches 50 party. Bookings have come in well and 57 out of 60 seats are spoken for on the bus for Saturday. Some folk are additionally booking to shadow the tour in private vehicles and/or just attend the evening party. Hopefully some worthwhile photos of the tour will result from the shadowing parties.

Some reminders about joining:
The bus will start and end its day at Dreadnought Coaches Alnwick depot. Some individuals have elected to join the vehicle between Alnwick and Newcastle. This must be arranged between those involved and the bus company direct.

The tour will officially start at 9am outside Newcastle Central Station. A big red doubledeck half cab bus labelled Dreadnought should be obvious.

Those travelling into Newcastle from the Tyne Valley are recommended to use the local train service leaving Prudhoe at 08.24 (and other Tyne Valley stops). The connection off the local train will be held. Purchase your own train fare.

The route will be via Chester Le Street, Durham, Willington to Stanhope. Certain pick ups have been negotiated along this route.

We hope to be in Stanhope main street for 11am and a one hour coffee stop. After which we will process past Killhope and onto Alston for an extended afternoon stop allowing lunch and an optional South Tynedale train ride at either 14.15 or 15.30.

The South Tynedale Railway has been approached and have offered a group booking rate payable on the day. They say:

Adults £5.00, Children(3-15 yrs.) £2.25. Valid to two return journeys. Payment on the day is perfectly acceptable by cash , cheque or card (not American Express ).

They also say a steam engine is "quite possible" and, too, a visit to the sheds, suitable tough footwear recommended.

Alston will be left promptly on the return of the 15.30 train. The destination will be Stocksfield Institute. The ladies of the Snods Edge Church Hall Sunday Afternoon Teas have agreed to cater for the party. They will donate their profit to the Tynedale Hospice. A Pennine Chapel style high tea with lots of corned beef pie and scope for kiddies games. This is from 6pm-8pm. The bus will leave the venue at about 8pm for Newcastle Central. Any trains running commencing from the 8.47pm (South) should be connected with. We will check the timetables nearer the time but would intend that options from Edinburgh to York could be covered for those wishing to be home on Saturday night.

May I stress that the costs of the bus hire and of the catering for the party will be met by myself and Fiona. If you receive this email, it will be because we have understood you to have committed to come along. If for some reason you change your mind, please let us know immediately, so that seats can be re-allocated. Your booking is presently allocated ______ seats. The party venue is not dry and we invite guests to brings drinks of all types. You could stock up during the day. We will provide tea, coffee, squash.

Sunday arrangements will be low key and arranged on Saturday. Church attendance at Roman Catholic, Anglican or Baptist venues should be possible and a Sunday lunch meeting in one of the local hostelries like the White Swan at Ovingham. For those not wishing to go to Church (I would quite like to thank God for making it to 50), there is a recommended walk up Whittle Dene in Ovingham.

A present is not necessary. We want for nothing aged 50. A donation of timetables to the Forsythe Collection is always welcome. We will solicit donations by cheque to one of two charities. Tiny Lives, the Newcastle Hospital's charity for premature births and Sarnelli House, an orphanage in Thailand which our friendly neighbour Davina Radford works with (she will be on the bus). Please make any donation out to either The Tiny Lives Fund or Sarnelli House Orphanage.

Finally, we shall be incommunicado the Friday-Wednesday before the 31st October making a little excursion to Eurospoor in Utrecht.

Transport, tickets and specialist collecting magazines.

2009-07-23T01:41:00.000-07:00

Specialist Auctions works brilliantly for all sorts of niche subjects. In turn many of these subjects have specialist organisations furthering their interests. Where possible it is nice to create a relationship between the auction site and an interested organisation. Here is an example of how this can be done. The Transport Ticket Society (see http://www.transport-ticket.org.uk/) was established in 1946. Their journal is one of the most august of these types in literature in the transport heritage field and there are many such. In Number 546 for July 2009, your author and Specialist Auctions moderator has managed to place a page of copy which also deploys the "model bus" advert generated earlier this year.Hopefully this will bring new folk to list at Specialist Auctions and they will also take advantage of the quite wide spread of ticket material already listed.There are two obvious categories to check at Specialist Auctions and these are:http://www.specialistauctions.com/categories.php?parent=5045

for the rail tickets

http://www.specialistauctions.com/categories.php?parent=10807

for the bus tickets.Other tickets can be found at Specialist Auctions including aviation and sporting examples. Mentioning the area of of specialist collecting journals, a little searching of the site revealed that some good examples of these are also being listed. For instance from the Huddersfield Canal Society http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctionsearch.php?posted=1&keywords=Huddersfield%20canal&category=0 . An especially rare title which was being offered as I typed was a group of 19 Corgi Club Magazines from the early 1960s. This is the diecast car sort of Corgi not the woof-woof. See them at http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctionsearch.php?posted=1&keywords=corgi%20club%20magazine&category=0. I offer a number of onboard magazines from railway operators past and present like http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1261736 . Specialist magazines do not just cover transport collectables. There are many in the Specialist site for the craftworking theme like http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1365214 .

The Great Gating Debate on Britain's railways

2009-05-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

For some while now a great debate between the rail industry, government, rail users and other interested parties (the general public who value the routes that were deliberately created at York and Sheffield stations for instance which ease pedestrian flow) has been developing. It revolves around the government and the rail industry seeking to reverse the Open Stations policy of British Railways developed in the mid 1980s and archived in the Forsythe Collection at York. The nuance of the present position is that the 175 year old tradition of platform tickets allowing legitimate access for other interested persons to the station is being abolished. Major stations are to be like airports "airside", only for travellers. Earlier in 2009 I had a letter published on the subject in Rail Management On Line.

This blog reflects a development consequent on a new leaflet being issued. Readers may have seen in the Spring of 2009 the new Natex Your Guide to Ticket Gates leaflet.
1 It lists the stations where they WILL be placed. Like Grantham, York, Newcastle.
2 Platform access is made clear. There will be no platform tickets. Platform access is only for travellers. Anyone "seeing off" (their phrase) can get onto a platform only at the discretion of the station manager. Once on the platform "there will be no return", their phrase.

On several counts this is a stupid document and should be withdrawn. I say that advisedly and will defend this view. That is because the document lacks internal logic.

In truth I have no objection to barriers in the cause of fare evasion. I don't really get their relevance to security. Unless the entire rail network is barriered, malcontents will always be able to plan a way through. And I absolutely think that the whole rail industry should accept - as it used to - that other people apart from travellers have a legitimate cause to access the platform. This always used to be the case, literally for generations. An operator or a government who does not recognise this will need to recognise the offence that they will cause to the general public as a result. Needless disharmony all for want of being willing to sell a platform ticket.

I do want to express a view because I think it deserves saying and being heard in several quarters. I am not dyed in the wool anti gates. I remember when main stations were barriered. The gates as such are not the problem. I don't want fare evasion to continue.
The problem is wonderfully simple. As currently expressed, this new leaflet does it bluntly, the rail industry seems to be saying if you are not travelling you have no business on the platform. That historically was never the situation. It was always if you want to go onto the platform for any number of reasons, buy a platform ticket.

It is this matter which makes me so angry, that about 175 years of accepted tradition and civil liberty is being swept away because the operators are unwilling it appears to sell platform tickets. How is someone seeing off (or meeting which is not mentioned in the Nat Ex leaflet) going to get near a Station Manager to get "permission"? It just does not make any sense at all. The ordinary person will not bother and will just feel their life has been a little more spoilt and interfered with as seems increasingly the case nowadays. It seems to be that if you beg nicely enough, you might be allowed through. It used to be that you paid for a platform ticket and you were accorded some respect in return.

The technology to solve the problem is all there, APTIS issued platform tickets with magnetic coding. Why if the rail industry thinks barriers are a good thing go this extra mile to ban access and thereby alienate many reasonable people who might otherwise accept the change without complaint?

Collecting leaflets is much more fun than downloading websites

2009-05-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

I am just back from the RPSI railtour around Ireland. What a wonderful success. Full marks to all involved from the society and railway administrations. For me, it was the second tour in a row. Before that in 1986 and 1995 I was over to chase it from the car. 1986 was Westport and number 4 so it was really lovely to be there again in 2009 with the same engine. She can really make steam and her shrill whistle in the Irish landscape was a joy. We could upload hundreds of train bus and tram pictures but for us the one that does it was taken Saturday night by my friend Alex Nelson of Chester Le Track when the two of us had walked the old railway to Westport Quay and found ourselves staring at the pilgrim mountain Croagh Patrick. One day maybe I will get up it and give thanks. And the title? It's a nice little aphorism and explains so much about what we do and going to Ireland to collect transport leaflets absolutely fits the bill. I came back well laden.

Easter Saturday 2009 at Garsdale

2009-04-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Myself and Fiona are Christians of a liberal sort. Over Easter weekend family arrangements meant we did not enter a church.

However our Easter Saturday was surprisingly and graciously infused with the spirit of the Risen Christ. We needed to journey from Prudhoe to mother in law at Castle Douglas in Galloway. I came up with the idea of going via Garsdale. That is a hamlet 1000 feet up in the Yorkshire Dales with a station (an erstwhile junction) on the Settle to Carlisle railway line. On the map it would not appear to be the way to go. The week before an email had arrived in my in box appealing for people to get to Garsdale station between 11-1200 on Easter Saturday and promised free food for those so doing. What an offer. I looked into it and found that by driving 140 miles instead of 100, we could go via the scenic A686 route over Hartside and break our day by stopping at Langwathby station. An early start would put us on the 0953 southbound out of Langwathby and give us a day in Eden visiting Garsdale and later on Kirkby Stephen for the Easter Bus Rally. The latter is always a favourite of mine as all sorts of vintage machines and men enjoy their annual resurrection.

The sense of blessing started with the weather. This must have been one of the nicest Easter Saturdays in the Dales in years. Certainly not like last year. I was surprised when 20 people boarded the train at Langwathby. Throughout the day the S&C appeared busy. But this was not an ordinary day. It was 20 years to the day that the S&C had been reprieved from closure and that was what this day was about. An Easter celebration of the salvation of the Settle and Carlisle. It was rather more than that. At Garsdale there was a remarkable show and yes, plenty of free hospitality. Around 200 people, maybe more, had found their way to this isolated station. Once there, open-air spechifying took place. Hardly anywhere to sit, we stood on the platform. I am used to sermons and often they have a remarkable ability to send me to sleep. It might be thought that 30 minutes or so of spechifying at Garsdale would have the same effect. Instead an electrifyingly moving atmosphere grew in the crowd.

A story was being told, it was a tragic story but with a resurrection. We were actually assembled for three purposes: to mark the 20th anniversary of the reprieve, to see the completion of a £250,000 restoration of Garsdale station itself, and this included the unveiling of a bronze statue of a dog, conveniently and sensibly placed opposite the signalbox for the signalman to keep an eye on it (heading photos). This all seems a bit strange. What has a dog got to do with this. A dead dog at that, dead since about 1990. The dog's name was Ruswarp and he had become an officially recognised objector at the closure enquiry to the line. In turn this was because his master Graham Nuttall was one of the leading opponents.

Both man and dog saw the line reprieved although only months later Graham died walking alone in North Wales. Ruswarp was with him and would not leave his master and was himself found weeks later by another walker, emaciated and near to death. He was rescued and Graham was buried. The story of a man's best friend and faithful love in the face of death caught the press attention then. Now, 20 years later and at Easter, a true partnership of volunteers and professionals (none being amateurs) had come together and were marking this anniversary in an outstanding way and receiving the blessing of the weather God. In our header picture the tall man is Ron Cotton, the one time BR manager charged with closing the line though in fact he did much to demonstrate its appeal. The lady chaired the closure enquiry. They were brought together to unveil the statue. The throng included an MP giving up his Easter Saturday (Eric Martlew from Carlisle). Network Rail who have poured money into the regeneration were out in force with senior management. The Friends of the Settle to Carlisle Line likewise. It all brought back memories for me of fighting the closure in the early 1980s. I was one of the objectors and made my way to a rally Mike Harding fronted at Settle in 1984.

It became a splendid occasion. The final touches for us were courtesy of John Diggles. He was on the PA system and managed to unearth some rather special music. He had come along with an old vinyl single issued for the Stockton & Darlington Rail 150 celebrations at Shildon in 1975 . The "A" side of the disc, by a band called "Geordies Penkers" was called "The Iron Road" and was not played. On the"B" side was a tune called "Land of the Pennine God". This was written and performed by the late Mike Donald from Skipton. He was a folk singer/songwriter and S&C railway fan in the 1970s. I would love to get printed words and music for this song. It was an evocative ballard about the smash on December 24th 1910 just north of Garsdale after the signalman there incorrectly operated the signalling leading to a northbound sleeping car express crashing into light engines with the loss of nine lives. My wife thought rather plausibly as we listened to the ballard on the platform beside the box to which it referred that the title was "Land of the Pennine Fog". I preferred God and apparently this is the title.

For the Pennine God I owe much to the poet W. H. Auden. He effectively managed an entire revelation of a God in tune with geology and evolution through the Pennine fault that runs to the east side of the Eden Valley down which the S&C descends to Carlisle. Garsdale may not be one of Auden's names but Hawes five miles away certainly is and Garsdale was of course once known as Hawes Junction, as it was on the night of the smash. Auden's masterful itinerary England: "Six Unexpected Days" for American Vogue in 1954 went via Hawes. For my money this Easter Saturday this Pennine God was alive and kicking on the platforms of Garsdale station.

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It would of course be very easy to pooh-pooh introducing God to this post. I will point out however that after uploading the post, the sculptress of Ruswarp read the post and introduced herself in an email. To quote from that email: "Why JOEL is answered by the fact that I was not aware of the gift of being able to sculpt until it was "announced" directly after I had become a Christian with a capital C". JOEL is the signature inscribed on the sculpture by Jo Walker. More information is at http://www.animalsculpture.co.uk/ .

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A note added 26th June 2009. I have now sourced both the songbook and LP record North by North East of Mike Donald's. These fully provide "Land of the Pennine God" and other delights and should anyone show interest a mini-revival may follow.

Ina Steiner's editorial: the future for online niche vendors

2009-04-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y209/m04/abu0237/s01 I recommend as obligatory reading about where ebay is going (which is not where we are going), where on-line selling is going as a whole, about how to find your own audiences - the use of Twitter et al. It is all stuff we would recognise on this site www.specialistauctions.com but coming from Ina Steiner it should interest most of us small niche sellers.

Railway Postcards and Photographs

2009-04-16T04:37:00.001-07:00

Listings in the railwayana and public transport sections of http://www.specialistauctions.com/ keep expanding and in the last little while a new vendor devabob has helped fill the
Collectables > Railwayana > Postcards category at http://www.specialistauctions.com/categories.php?parent=5047 . When I looked there were 810 listings. Other vendors include myself robertatforsythe, cargo365 and interestingtreasures .
Because you can list in two categories for nothing, items can also be found in
Collectables > Postcards > Railway.
Individual examples that I think are bit special include
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1339577
the Glasgow Subway
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1339585
Douglas Station Isle of Man in 1969
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1339596
one of a number of Czech railway postcards
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1339617
an example of a number of American cards.
If you like railway postcards, you are sure to find something and by the way if maritime imagery is your thing there's a large number of tug photos on the site as well like
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1334882Finally here's one of mine
http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1066938
which is the entry illustration of this post.

Vienna: a note

2009-04-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

Anyone who writes knows that what is published is the tip of an iceberg of what is written. This is true for me. Huge screeds of unwritten material surround us at home. A highlight in 2008 was an invitation to speak at a conference in Vienna, Austria in September. It led to the creation of an essay which after the usual round of submissions and rejections was forgotten about. "Beautiful piece, pity no-one reads essays any more" about sums up the reaction I got. Just this day I was stimulated by a call for papers for the next conference in this series from the IIID. Whether I get there again or not will be another story but it made me think I should upload the essay to the blog and see if any reaction followed.

Vienna: A Sugar Icing Confection

2009-04-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Copyright Robert Forsythe

Vienna: a sugar icing confection?

I am sitting looking out of a train window on a sunny morning. It is about 08.30am and the landscape could pass for the Hampshire Downs. Some rolling hills; no mountains are in sight. Before me are arable fields, cereal, maize, several farm buildings. A village appears in the distance perhaps several hundred metres from the tracks. We roll through a wayside station and on a blue sign is the name Kirchstetten. A wave of emotion and recognition struck me.

Home for me is a hillside, the setting for a small town, once reliant on coal mining, in the Tyne Valley between Newcastle and Hexham. Often in conversation, no-one has heard of Prudhoe. We have our Norman castle. Depending on how high you get up the hillside, three miles to the north and well in sight is Hadrian’s Wall. Our immediate landscape is that of the end of Roman Empire, that of vicious border disputes (to be bereaved), and for a railway enthusiast as I am, my study window looks down on Britain’s first cross country railway from Newcastle to Carlisle opened in 1838. South of our town, the Pennine hills stretch over 150 miles, for the Tyne Valley marks their northern boundary. A sense of place and location has always been important to me. They are accents which help define the person.

All of which improbably explains my reaction to Kirchstetten. Sitting in the train, I am undertaking something of an unlikely excursion. It is achieving over five days around 21 personal firsts[1]. The train which I had joined in Cologne was in today’s parlance CNL313. CNL stands for Citynightline, a network of trans-Europe overnight services[2]. CNL313 is a named train called the Donau Kurier or Danube Courier[3] and at Kirchstetten I was approaching the end of over 12 hours in my sleeping cabin[4] and of a 26 hour all train journey from Prudhoe to Vienna. The direct purpose of the trip was that later on that day I would deliver a paper called Messages from the Western European Fringes to an international conference in a venue overlooked by the towering blocks of the UNO-City on the banks of the Danube[5]. What had brought me thus far was an unlikely combination of looking after around quarter of a million pieces of transport publicity and the very specific uplifting community tale of one of those pieces called the Isle of Mull timetable. Somehow I had persuaded the conference organisers that the Mull timetable was worth international attention and I certainly think that is the case.

What was it about Kirchstetten which had so moved me? I know Auden is buried there and it was a very emotional moment, alone in a first class sleeping cabin with the country rolling past and an exclusive window for one (actually four windows, a berth, a toilet and a shower, with table and two chairs for one - you should not travel Europe in halves).
And is there any connection between my feelings for Kirchstetten and the direct cause for my passing by, the invite to deliver a conference paper? The answer to the first question comes in that one word: Auden. It would be sad if the reader does not recognise Auden but I fear that might increasingly be the case. Auden (1907-1973) was in the 20th century one of the absolute pillars of writing in the English language. He was not either an easy man or an easy writer to follow. To appreciate Auden one has to work and there is a first point of connection to my visit to Vienna. I was come to engage in the debate about INFOCONNECTIVITY and public transport. It was organised by a very respected Viennese based design house called IIID International Institute for Information Design. The two principal individuals behind the conference are highly regarded designers[6].

My interest in Auden works at several levels. As the writer of Night Mail, he was soon in the consciousness of a young railway enthusiast. A different Auden was revealed to me at University whilst studying theology. What really made Auden click for me however, I only learnt about after I was 27, when I discovered the Pennine Auden. Now, after nearly two decades studying that, this side of Auden remains relatively little understood. Despite which, it is a fact that the immediate environs of my home landscape is Auden’s own self described “Mutterland”[7]. Auden was willing to eulogise old railway trains, lead mines and limestone wherever he found them. I have not been a terribly good European citizen but Auden was. He called himself a Citizen of the World. He resided at different times in Britain, America, Italy, Austria and made extended visits inter alia to Germany, Iceland and China. He only ever owned one house and that was in Kirchstetten. The house was owned from 1957 and was his summer retreat. Auden died suddenly one night having given a poetry reading in the Palais Palffy in Vienna. He was found dead in his hotel room in the Altenburgerhof, Walfischgasse the next morning 29th September 1973. He was buried in Kirchstetten on the 4th October[8].

I did not actually travel to Vienna with all this in mind, I needed to remind myself of the detail on my return home, but in my sub-conscious I had every reason to want to pass Kirchstetten and visit Vienna. Sometimes friends and readers have found it difficult to see how I hang together diverse interests but I have no doubt whatsoever that, consummate traveller and student of technical matters that he was, Auden would fully understand my desire to be at a conference on public transport interconnections and good design in Vienna and to get there the whole way from his Pennines by train. Perhaps his spirit helped prosecute the entire enterprise?

Before the journey is completed into Vienna, return back to Newcastle for this journey across Europe to a conference on INFOCONNECTIVITY was also a practical exercise in INFOCONNECTIVITY. Even planning the journey had required intellectual engagement. I should have started with The Man in Seat 61[9]. Even in the 1980s it would have all been so simple. I would have wandered into Newcastle railway station (not a train station as it is now, when did that linguistic change occur and why?) and picked up a leaflet. There was an international series published by BR and readily available in stations. These publications were issued until at least 1992, thereafter in the UK both privatisation and digitisation did for them. The timetable in 1992 showed two clear routes London to Vienna. The journey could then be done in just about 24 hours.

Some things change for the better and others for the worse. The journey time has, thanks to the Channel Tunnel and the European high speed trains, had about four hours shaved off the London time. From Prudhoe about 3 hours away in the North East, you are looking at around 24 hours train travel. The key thing is going in and out of Vienna on an overnight sleeper train which has come down the Rhine Valley from Amsterdam and the knack is how you hop onto that from St Pancras. The choice is via Paris and SNCF or Bruxelles and SNCB. In the old days, staff at Newcastle (there was a European booking office even in the 1990s) would have advised and sold tickets impartially. Today the customer must decide for himself from some quite confusing choices.

Austrian Railways ÖBB had a good web site which came up with times but could not sell tickets. Rail Europe (French Railways SNCF in the UK) had a range of times and fares, some looking very cheap if booked far enough in advance but would require a station change in Paris. A little company called Trains Europe at March Station could fix the lot and provide times but I wondered how robust a little company would be? I went round in quite a lot of circles with the internet because another major factor is choosing accommodation in the overnight train. I wanted to talk to a human being who would advise me and not endless screens which I quickly forgot. Eventually DB German Railways was alighted on, their office in Surbiton is staffed by English speaking Germans who were very helpful and finally I found myself booking a £563 London to Vienna return whose elements consisted of six legs, three of which I was advised to take as first class. One of those legs via Eurostar was a bargain ticket and the two first class sleeping car journeys (including one at bargain rate) ensured privacy and exclusive cabin occupancy. I am the world’s worst sleeper (as would be discovered later in Vienna) and the requirement to travel in the sleeper in some comfort was pretty much basic.

Already before putting a foot in a train, I had had to spend a lot of time planning the journey compared with the past when a simple visit to a real person in a real booking hall would have done the job. It is not really progress is it? Many readers would of course be telling me that I SHOULD have flown because it would have been both cheaper and quicker. It would have been about 7 hours in total door to door with one change of plane. I have never been a great flyer. My third return flight had been made in May this year when I organised a short hop Newcastle to Belfast. That ended up taking the award for my worst ever travel experience[10]. The general ethos of airport terminals, separation from baggage, loss of control, impossibility of escape from fellow drunken passengers, incarceration in a sardine can[11] never did it for me. The recent security situation finishes the matter with the real possibility of physical humiliation for the average harmless person. In the event, I had organised a flight tempted by the price, only for Easyjet to cancel the flight with me at the airport. Not only was their immediate behaviour (the washing of hands) gross but the subsequent work required to obtain a refund was out of all proportion to the money involved which no doubt is how Easyjet intend it. However after a complaint to the Information Commissioner and much general nastiness, I received both a refund of the original fare and of the replacement flight that I had had to organise. Apparently receiving a refund is something of a novelty so I was quite chuffed, even if the second payment only appeared in the bank account the Monday before this Viennese trip started on Wednesday 3rd September 2008, an anniversary of European dimensions.

At 6.15am that morning, I was packed and ready to start my environmentally friendly marathon of civil travel. There was no need to start the car, I walked within 10 minutes to the station. For a change this summer, it was not raining. The air was fresh on Prudhoe’s platform. On time (it is not always reliable, I am not so naïve) the first Newcastle train of the day arrived at 6.30am. For sure train travel can be improved and I am no fan of every aspect of modern information provision believing there are horses for courses. The conceptual hiccup about the 6.30am was why was I on it at all? The Eurostar left St Pancras at 12.57 more than six hours away. Why was I not on the 9am from Newcastle at Kings Cross 12.17 with 40 minutes for connection[12]? Later in the day I would be making an official 21 minute international connection at Cologne. Being on the 9am I would have left Prudhoe at 8.04 am.

The explanations of this are varied. When I had decided to buy a ticket from DB, they could not sell a ticket outside London. Trains Europe had actually quoted me £563 via Bruxelles and the sleeper from Prudhoe[13]. This meant I had to procure my tickets to London from my college friend one Alex Nelson. Nowadays he is the stationmaster of Chester-le-Track running Chester-le-Street station as a franchise. Their advice was that I needed a Euro Standard Single made out to London CIV. This is a free access to all trains ticket issued to European ticket holders, its merit being that it implies continuation of journey by alternative services if delayed, unlike a train specific advance purchase bargain which if things cocked up would leave me no redress if I missed the Eurostar. So another £100 had gone on getting me to and from London and additionally the official advice on the itinerary was to use the 6.30am to allow plenty of time for late running and check-in.

I played safe but this is not the railways at their best. In fact it gets worse. Despite inventing the railway system, Britain through the 20th century showed an astonishing aptitude for being left behind. Main line electrification was getting well under way through Europe in the first two decades of the 20th century. At first it looked as if North East England and the North East Railway could be up there with the leaders. The NER implemented two different electrification schemes and had a third for the real McCoy lined up. That third scheme was The Electric Railway That Never Was[14]. The NER main line north of York was to be electrified and NER no. 13 was built as the prototype for the job in 1919. It never did more than a few tests; steam and diesel ran the East Coast Main Line until the wires took over in 1991.

Even more frustrating is that soon after the electrics got to Newcastle, we received a commitment to join the European railway network. This was more than hope, this was reality. As the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994 Regional Eurostar sets to serve Newcastle were built so also Nightstar sleeping car stock for tunnel use. The prospect of perhaps a one change journey to Vienna or, perish the hope, even a through service from Edinburgh to Vienna via (Newcastle), London, Paris, Basel, a great European capitals express would have been mouthwatering. It was a pipedream despite all the expenditure and the Nightstar stock was sold to Canada.

Even with the tunnel open in 1994, passengers like myself focussed on the East Coast Main Line were in limbo. The Eurostars joined the antiquated third rail network and trundled though Kent to London Waterloo. That finally changed in the autumn of 2007 with the completion of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the opening of St Pancras International and that in turn liberated the way to make the change by crossing the street at King’s Cross.

Which convolutions had got me aboard the 6.30am at Prudhoe. I sat down in the modestly populated train and after about five minutes wondered whether it was Prince Harry facing me about 10 feet away. I will perhaps never know the answer to that but if it was not him, it was someone able to do a darned good impersonation of him. Arrival in Newcastle was prompt and the 7am to London was in the station. “Prince Harry” hurried off to its first class section. He is known to have made visits to friends in the Tyne Valley.

Officially I was destined for the 7.40am to London. Arrivals into Newcastle from Prudhoe at 06.52am and 08.03am are hardly adequate for those bent on an early start. There was the 7am in the station and I had a ticket freely available on all departures. I got on it and made for the buffet car whose seats generally in my experience are unreserved. No problems there.

Almost a smooth journey followed, nearly but not quite. Somewhere just north of Werrington Junction, the train shuddered to a halt and the main lights went out. Power had evidently gone. Sure enough the Guard advised that a safety critical system had stopped the train and that the driver was walking the length of the train to investigate. Fortunately he was able to re-set the system and arrival in London was about 20 minutes down. I had something like 3 hours for the connection.

These were going to be my first steps inside St Pancras since it had re-opened. I had walked past the frontage on Saturday 7th June 2008. That was in the cause of attending an old friend’s 50th party over a lunch at Lords. Not my normal territory but very enjoyable nonetheless, save that on arrival at Kings Cross, the Underground (and I think the main station) were being evacuated owing to a security alert. The pavements outside the twin stations were nearly jammed solid with a slow moving mass of humanity. On that occasion, rather than even try to use public transport, I walked to Lords and I walked back. That return included am amble through Regent’s Park only slightly marred near the London Mosque when the policeman observed to be leisurely passing the time of day leaning over a little bridge parapet was carrying a sub-machine gun. The civilised city routine is not quite convincing when machine gun toting policemen are mixing with the children.

This time there were no security alerts. There was an AEC Routemaster bus and nowadays that is worth comment. The half cab red double decker was the acme of a purpose built London bus with thousands built 1954-1968. With much soul searching and owing nothing to anyone, ordinary commercial London service ceased on 9th December 2005. London buses remain predominantly red but the capital is a different place without the Routemaster and many people including the London Mayor Boris Johnson elected in 2008 are no fans of the Mercedes Benz articulated replacements. The Bendi Buses are thought through their length to create traffic impediments in a manner no Routemaster did and nor are they nearly as accessible lacking an open platform to board by. The sight of SMK 735F parked in the sun in Midland Road beside St Pancras was heartwarming and demanded a photo. Since the “final” withdrawal, two heritage routes in Central London have continued to use Routemasters mainly for the benefit of tourists. The Routemaster I found was a spare bus for one of these routes and this day it was on a private hire duty.

Inside I needed only a short time to be convinced that the new St Pancras does just what the tin says. It is an international travel icon marrying the best of old and new and leaving the user with a sense of the transcendent possibilities of travel. The station is spacious, even excessively so. There was perhaps not quite a generous enough provision of public seating with much of the seating visible “upstairs” at platform level associated with food and drink outlets. But the two powerful positives with me were the imaginative use of the old underground spaces to create the bulk of the new passenger facilities and the patronage of the arts. With its original trainshed roof and revived Gothic hotel frontage, the station is an art piece in itself. Two substantial sculptures add to this. John Betjeman is the smaller but as an incorrigible railway enthusiast and traveller, this is a poet laureate entirely deserving of a permanent place in the new station. He and Auden were good friends and their last meeting was in the Marylebone station buffet.

It is difficult to miss Paul Day’s The Meeting Place. This 9m high bronze shows a standing couple snogging. I stood by it for some time taking in the reactions of passers by. A few were disgusted, most were in awe, many took pictures, some couples even managed to argue over it. I am a fan of this art piece. Travel has so often had sexual and relational overtones. Travel is about new possibilities, departures, moving on, being part of a journey of life and the journey of life is always in some sense a sexual and sensual encounter. When we eventually reach Vienna some comments about the obvious openness of Viennese sexuality can be made. We in Britain are notoriously tight lipped about the subject and so to plonk a 9m high bronze in the centre of the concourse of our new European gateway is undeniably avant garde.

British security and immigration procedures ensure nothing happens very fast and so the business of getting on board the 12.57pm to Brussels took a while. I had a considerable sense of real excitement when having passed the various irksome hurdles, I was actually on an escalator and about to board a Eurostar, only 14 years after they entered service. The first trip on a Eurostar is bound to impress. I can assuredly say they are comfortable (even more so in First Class which I used on the return). However as a scenic advert for Britain one should be wary of overdoing it. Much of the journey in Britain is in tunnel (quite apart from the Channel itself). The first tunnel starts about half a mile from the St Pancras platform ends and runs for miles under East London. There’s a brief moment of excitement near the Thames Crossing. That is another tunnel but a good view of the M25 viaduct is provided first. The Medway viaduct is also impressive.

As a traveller to Europe the excitement is bound to increase when one shoots out of the Calais portal and an initial downland landscape similar to that back on the other side fairly soon gives way to the low lying farmland that will extend into Walloonia. There are glimpses of canals. Dunkerque is there in the background. Summer storm clouds were building and sweeping the country with a grey wall of rain down to the ground. Beyond Lille and the high speed line to Brussels Midi has been generated by SNCB[15]. Approaching Brussels Midi through Forest, although the line is a technical accomplishment, the sheer amount of graphiti and dereliction was depressing. Changing trains at Midi confirmed this. I could not call it a great European station. There were some very dark corners. True, there were lots of trains inside and trams outside. But as the photos confirmed too many of these were covered with graphiti. As the politics might confirm, the Belgians do not seem too proud of their country[16].

The connection seemed to go smoothly until having left on time we ground to a halt in the tunnel just north of Midi. My advance knowledge of where the THALYS went on leaving Brussels Midi was a bit sketchy. In fact a new high speed line is nearly complete (??) but we were still on classic tracks to Aachen and would suffer thereby. There had been catenary problems outside Brussels and we began to steadily lose time in the face of the tightest connection of the day: 21 minutes at Cologne. Schaerbeek station was a mass of traditional cast iron platform canopies. The Belgiums have an intense railway network and there was no shortage of trains to spot.

The climb over the Ardennes Plateau is deceptive although I knew that once the Meuse was reached, the landscape would change dramatically. Even so I was not prepared for the ski slope of an incline that the traditional railway has to slide down to reach Liège Guillemins. Liège and the accompanying valleys that the train then wound through Angleur, Trooz, Pepinster and Verviers to beyond the border crossing and arrival at Aachen surely knew some British hands in their industrialisation?[17] It was not difficult to think that one was in a Yorkshire mill valley and not in the Low Countries at all. Near Aachen is the Drielandenpunt where Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands all meet at a hill 323 metres high. Not far away is Plombières (lead mines[18]), whilst a freight only line running on the Belgium side under the Drielandenpunt is an important artery from Germany to the ports called the Iron Rhine[19].

Industrialisation was and is the message, although the valley of the Vesdre seems, like Yorkshire, to have a struggle. Towering brick chimneys, crazily inclined brick terraces, spurs of rock through which the railway passed, abundant evidence of the use of water power, derelict factories. It all seemed a bit familiar. The continent re-asserted itself at Aachen. The Hbf was full of DB traction. In the distance the Dom could be seen and Aachen’s own double history as a one time European capital of Charlemagne and known to the French as Aix le Chappelle reminded me of my medieval history schooling in which I got an A grade at A level.

Approaching Cologne, the guard re-assured passengers that connections would be made. There were two long distance trains to Southern Germany which the THALYS fed into. At 8.01pm platform 6 which should have hosted the Donau Kurier held a delayed ICE the 7.54pm to Munich. The sleeper was directly behind and we would leave just a few minutes late. In each direction our arrival at the destination would be delayed (25 minutes down into Vienna, 70 minutes down back into Cologne but fortunately not to adversely affect my itinerary).

Having never been on a sleeper train at all, having ensured I had a deluxe compartment to myself, knowing that the Rhine Gorge would be travelled end to end both ways and that I had never seen the gorge at all, one was anticipating some feast of travel[20]. As The Man in Seat 61 puts it: “switch off the lights and watch the Rhine pass by, mountains and castles lit by moonlight, while sipping your complimentary white wine, Wonderful”. There was no moon and I am no drinker of wine, but it was wonderful.

For someone who loves model railways, I can express the sleeper journey like this. From the moment I shut the compartment door, switched off all the lights and propped my face against the window with a pillow, it was as if I had been miniaturised and discovered myself part of a model railway set. You see all these model railway images with far too many trains and tracks to be believable, you grow up on a diet of Faller and Pola buildings and then in the gloom of a September evening you realise it is true. German model railways are not a fantasy. There really are locomotive sheds with dozens of engines on view. There really are trains of just a couple of wagons followed by huge long rakes of mineral hoppers, containers and tankers.

Going out, despite the lack of moon, the number of floodlit castles and well lit barges ensured there was plenty to see. Coming back, we were about an hour late which ensured an excellent lit transit of the whole gorge, Locations long familiar from travel agent’s brochures in our collection were momentarily recognised. Just some impressions of the busy river: the 2 cars 1 speedboat barge, the four barge pusher, the water over the decks tanker, the training walls with water cascading over. Those last emphasized what a wild river this is. For this artery of Europe up and down which commerce continually flowed is largely untamed through the gorges. The training walls point out into the river every few hundred yards to direct and deepen the flow. And the water is visibly pouring over them emphasizing the natural gradient. At night navigation lights, the luminescence of bow waves entranced the eye. By day, the sheer number of rocks poking out of the river rammed home the skill and power that is required to bring these vessels through the gorge. Beyond the gorges, I missed the Rhine crossing at Mainz but was fully aware of Frankfurt am Main. Like St Pancras or Cologne an impressive train shed roof is emphatic.

As the night wore on I cat-napped. I am sure the regular traveller would indeed sleep. It really should not be too difficult. The train journey was akin to some form of vibratory massage. It was impossible to know which sensation could come next (the hardened traveller would just submit and snooze). The bed was entirely comfortable but not only were there station stops, there were stands in dark forests presumably whilst something ahead cleared a section, there were freights to be overtaken in loops, there was the reversal at Frankfurt and the splitting of the train at Karlsruhe. To Frankfurt and from Karlsruhe, our carriage was the front vehicle. Going outward, there were two WLABm sleepers for Vienna largely because of a party from the UK organised by Great Railway Journeys in York. When at the front, one could sense the power of the electric engine just ahead and feel the weight of the train behind. The carriage rode at times very steadily. At times you were moving and barely aware of movement. At other times, one was thumping around, through reverse curves, over indifferent track, clambering into summit tunnels. I remember one just before a pretty steep descent into Stuttgart. Coming back, the Vienna first class sleeper was the rear coach and instead of seeing the engine headlights ahead, it felt like being the tail of the snake and one could look forward and see this gyrating pattern of window lights oscillating ahead on the trees. The occasional silences were breathtaking. There was one at Karlsruhe when having gone backwards and forwards into a bay, the engine must have been taken off entirely for a while and all the systems shut down including the air-conditioning. The carriage was utterly still and silent.

I have always found poetry in names and to see the reality even at the dead of night of places that hitherto had only been visualised by map or timetable was tremendous. In the wee small hours beyond Stuttgart there were Plochingen, Goppingen (where Märklin trains are made), Geislingen Steige (I can see stock being readied for the day’s work there), Ulm, Augsburg, the tiny station at Esting where a lone railwayman stared as the night express rolled through, Munich, Prien where the short branch to the Chiemsee had etched itself onto my mind in the 1960s with a picture of a Glaskasten, Traunstein and the border at Freilassing. Going out on a Wednesday night the railway was alive with freight, engineers and even local passenger trains in the small hours near the cities, where lonely women waited on platforms that were bright lit oasis of the night. Coming back on the Saturday night one was aware of less traffic and I am sure we were diverted to miss the main station at Munich. It is staggering how much there is to be seen during a night journey when the compartment lights are off.

As the dawn came, the train was rolling through Upper Austria and it was time to think about Vienna as a continental breakfast was served. At Purkersdorf Sanatorium[21], the capital started feeling close. In the last few miles to the Westbahnhof abundant evidence of the ÖBB capital expenditure was provided. A tunnel to divert main line trains off the existing route is one project and is associated with a wider plan (much discussed at the conference) to achieve a through main line station for Vienna. At present Vienna has once again (with the expansion of the EU east and the end of the Iron Curtain) become a true European hub, yet its main railway termini are just that[22]. Westbahnhof’s concourse reminded me of Amsterdam Amstel, very much 1950s in the best sense. The platforms hosted several incoming European expresses and their passengers created that hub of different clothing, faces and voices that speaks of new places.

I had to hurry away and discover the Viennese Metro. My instructions suggested buying a Vienna three day rover and that was duly done. Over the next few days I saw a lot of the Metro and it was hot. Vienna was enjoying a week of 27-30C and mostly blue skies. I should not complain although my own temperament is cooler. I would also discover for real something that the conference examined. Strangers when in a large Metropolitan city readily navigate by Metro map. This might mean the most illogical geographical journeys but the Metro map offers certainties. For my first journey, the instructions were simple and an on time arrival for the start of the conference saw me leave the platforms of Kaisermühlen Metro having had a brief first glimpse of the Danube in Vienna. The conference venue is a former island in the Danube channels on which the modern Vienna International Centre is built. Three enormous tower blocks house the UN and are independent of Austrian territory hosting a UN Post Office which I never reached.

Arriving in the conference hall, I said Hello to Alex Nelson. Alex I have known since college at Durham. He lives about 20 miles away from home and is a transport professional in every sense. He runs a freelance railway station franchise at Chester –le – Street and his website Chester le Track[23] had brought him an invite to speak at the conference. Alex had flown, yet he had only left a couple of hours behind me. His flight was much shorter but no flight will get you from Newcastle in time for a 09.30 conference start in Vienna. A night in a hotel is inescapable, so same difference travelling by train for time; my night was in a sleeping car.

Alex was not the only person I knew there who had been to our house. Barry Roseman from Atlanta had visited our timetable collection and was another of the speakers. Although I had made clear to the organisers that I was neither a design nor transport professional, I did not feel too intimidated. Myself and Alex had the after lunch graveyard spot but I felt we both kept the delegates awake. As it happened, for the first session I was feeling a bit train-lagged. Professor Knoflacher was speaking about certainty and uncertainty in transport interconnections. I yawned for a moment or two, but he woke me up. Behind a beguiling gentle demeanour was a radical message. His imagery showed himself in a traffic jam standing in a car sized wooden framework. He wanted to introduce us to the blatant absurdities of everyday transport situations. I nodded my head. I soon picked up that in fact quite an incisive three way debate was taking place between him, representatives of the Austrian government who were present and the ÖBB. This was rather more lively than first thoughts might have suggested. The plan for a central through station for Vienna was by no means regarded as a universal panacea. He seemed to be attacking the thought that enough technology – even green technology – will always solve the problem. Certainly my few days in Vienna did reveal a willingness to embrace new infrastructure at quite a breath-taking pace, at least by British standards.

The sense that the conference was challenging continued. I was very taken by Keiichi Koyama who revealed how mobile phone tags are being used in Japan to create personalised answers to travel questions. The extent of the practical take-up already achieved was impressive. Most of us in Europe seemed wowed. The presence of Josef Schneider from the European Passengers Federation was good. EPF is at the head of the pile that my participation in the Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group feeds into and his role as a speaker acted as an interface to the actual passenger. Although in many ways we had all been actual passengers in getting to and from the conference. This was a theme explored by Martin Foessleitner as it is in this essay.

Nearer to home Tim Fendley in assessing Legible London spoke to a project I could personally comprehend. The London transport design legacy is emphatically one of the greatest the world has. Yet Tim had found a loophole. The pedestrian in London is not subject to one standard of signage but hundreds. Tim showcased this chaos and explained a proposal for addressing this. A very good idea but it did make me wonder. All the different existing standards, some wonderful, some terrible, will have behind them a person or a committee. The good ones will be the product of strong willed designers who have got noticed. Britain at present dislikes corporate images. London Transport AKA Transport for London has to fight to maintain its high standards. Outside the capital the legacy of people like Jim Cousins is ignored. There were two Danes at the conference (one was the Chair). They knew all about Jim Cousins. Jim’s book was published by the Danish Design Council[24]. Even in 2008 the work of Jim Cousins who designed the entirely successful British Rail corporate image with great names like Jock Kinneir from the mid 60s onwards can be found all over Europe. NS, DSB, ÖBB, SBB, NSB all directly took inspiration from what was done on British Rail in the mid 60s. We threw it mostly in the bin after privatisation – although the double arrow survives. Not only could a conference usefully examine this legacy but folk like Tim may need to reflect on the blood, sweat and tears that had to be expended to get a corporate image like this adopted for so large a concern. I have seen it said that the BR Corporate Image manual ended up filling 10 filing cabinets[25]. And I know of nowhere where that is archived.

I remain a great believer in simple concepts and in the worth of well designed printed material. Technological solutions can still value simplicity but I was concerned to learn at the conference how the printed master timetable offered to the public is being abandoned all over Europe. We tried to abandon it in Britain in 2007 only for two private publishers to print it in competition. The Germans aim to abandon it in 2008. I have written several times about this so move on[26].

A good example of simplicity is typeface. So many timetable publications use black and white. It is almost de facto intimidating. A deep blue or rich maroon will produce a much kinder and engaging product. The proof of this is in history. Look at old Eastern Counties or United Automobile timetables which were doing this in the 1950s and 1960s. And there are far more recent examples. The Mull timetable uses colour types, perhaps excessively so.

As the passenger and the historian, I was certainly thrilled by reaching Vienna and this conference but not everything in the information garden was rosy. The end of the printed Kursbuch has been mentioned. Another matter was that I expected to easily find the printed Reiseplan / Reisebegleiter which both DB and ÖBB used to issue. I found none. Even the train I used, the overnight sleeper, had no information on board for the passengers about the train's journey. Certainly whilst modern technology takes us forward with individual answers to individual questions, it is not nearly so good at producing attractive answers to context or even travel souvenirs. I am told that these Reiseplan / Reisebegleiter do very much remain in use and it was my bad luck that the CNL service did not employ them but they are not displayed at ÖBB stations. Train conductors hand them out.

As the conference ended on Thursday afternoon, I had an afternoon and a day for whistle-stop tourism in Vienna. I managed the Technology Museum although the hope of seeing their substantial steam locomotive collection was largely frustrated. Most of the engines were “on holiday” and would not return till November. To navigate the city exposed us to a range of maps. Wiener Linien did several. They were the transport provider and the city is a tram paradise. Smart un-vandalised wooden seated power cars and trailers are in abundance. The WL masterpiece was a Euro 2.50 64 panel 1:17,500 map of the city. For serious work this was indispensable. In fact it was a collection of maps. Yet like the Vienna Info maps from the tourist information, it was not easy to use. Largely this was because names were printed over other names. The clearest city centre map I found was in The Gay Guide to Vienna. The result as conference speakers suggested was that prospective passengers make journeys within their realm of knowledge and the most obvious thing to comprehend was the Metro system and its map.

After a map the next most challenging matter most users encounter is the ticket. It seemed pretty simple in Vienna. Buy the Vienna Card which was a rover ticket. However myself and Alex unknowingly abused this when travelling on the Wiener Lokalbahn. I had rather set my heart on travelling on this. I had found the Opera terminus by accident earlier in the day and Alex and I resolved to return on the Thursday evening.

We took a circuitous route from our hotel by tram and train which included a view of the Prater Riesenrad or Ferris Wheel[27]. The train drew into Vienna Meidling station, our planned interchange for a journey on the Wien Lokalbahn. Meidling station was daunting. It was new. A six platform through station very much both under construction and in use. There were some decidedly rough passages to negotiate in underpasses and entrance halls. Its overwhelming feature is the length of the platforms. Lineally they were numbered A-D so 6A-6D. To take some photos of Balfour Beatty (yes) maintenance vehicles in a depot at one platform end took a long time. It was whilst undertaking this walk, that it crossed our minds that one of four possibilities explained the station. That Austrian rail business was growing extra-ordinarily, that someone in Austria had been to Cambridge station and had decided to comprehensively outdo the Brits, that planning had decided to accommodate full length Eurostar or TGV sets and then some, or that a mischievous little game was being played by the engineers. In the English speaking legal world there is a game barristers and solicitors play. Bets are taken on what indecent or inappropriate words can be introduced into court without comment. A process of elision might be used as in the recent media example when the US General Pitraeus became General Betray-us. The ÖBB railway engineers’ version would be a competition to see who could build the longest railway platforms without attracting adverse comment.

Meidling is so enormous that its length encompasses two tram stops on the route in the parallel street. These are Meidling and Philadephiabrücke (?). One of these was where we got on the Lokalbahn. The Lokalbahn is very like the old American inter-urban. It runs for 30 kms from the town centre to the swish resort of Baden nestled under a hill. Freight is handled with its own diesel engines. A major model railway exhibition was being promoted by the Lokalbahn. Unfortunately it was for the next weekend. At times it is in the streets with other trams, then it is beside the ÖBB and gradually it becomes roadside reservation until it makes it into the vineyards and is independent of other hindrances before in Baden declining to a length of single track before the terminal. Deep in the heart of Vienna it dives down into a tramway subway which runs some considerable way and includes a three way underground junction and stations at Kliebergasse[28]. These underground worlds are enormous. There is virtually an underground city under the sweet greenspace and boulevards between Opera and Karlsplatz.

The thing about the ticket was that we took a short working to Wiener Neudorf. After some time we began to see Wien signs on the other side of the road facing streets leading away. It occurred to us that this might be the city boundary and then we thought the tickets were probably not valid outside the city. Correct. However in all the travelling Alex and I did during our time in Vienna, the tickets were never ever examined; a very different attitude to revenue control than in Britain. There were no ticket gates just a composter machine which anyone could ignore. Have the Viennese a happy outcome that no-one really minds what Wiener Linien takes in by revenue or are the Viennese both very well informed and scrupulously honest?

On the Saturday morning I resolved to go the whole way to Baden. I found a WL office in the underground world at Karlsplatz and paid 4 Euro for the correct extra tickets. The trip to Baden was thoroughly worthwhile and tea outside in the park by the casino was a magical half hour. I spent much of it hoping I would find my way back to Austria again, for longer, and with more leisure. Service was by an attractive Austrian girl wearing something towards traditional costume. Payment was made to her at the table into a sizeable leather money satchel. This seemed the norm for this sort of transaction. The same performance had come into play late at night when we twice enjoyed exquisite ice cream from a pavement café adjacent to our hotel.

A hot afternoon remained as I returned to town. When left to explore a city, I like to do things my own way. Of course I will visit the tourist office and preferably the municipal transport bureau. I will pick up all the different maps that I can, all the brochures advertising expensive city tours. I might even treat myself to one. In Vienna on the Saturday afternoon, it was the 13 Euro ride around the ring from Karlsplatz on a lady driven tram from the tramway museum. Beside our vintage vehicle, another pair constituted the wedding tram. A couple were doing the business with a minister beside Otto Wagner’s station now a museum. I will certainly applaud what Otto Wagner did for the city. During the journey, it was the incessant Viennese waltzes being played through a tannoy to all seven of us passengers as the four wheeled tram ground around curves that began to form the idea that Vienna could by contrast become a form of purgatory in sugar icing. The sweetness can possibly become nauseous and so many extraordinarily decorated clean buildings (was it a large scale use of faience?) with endless visions of gaily tripping humanity taken with lashings of ice cream and rich pastries can become counter-productive.

Fortunately I only went on the one tourist ride. There were many to choose from and if I returned there would have to be a boat trip on the Danube. Much of my exploring was more experimental. I might have a vague idea where I was aiming for. I had a rover ticket to get me out of any bother, but largely I enjoy walking. I enjoy the slightly secondary streets where you never know what the next shop will be. I had set out on the Saturday morning down Taborstrasse out of town from the hotel. Very soon I found myself in the Kirche Am Tabor, all empty, the caretaker arrived as I left. I walked through the Jewish quarter. Constantly in Vienna there are spectacular pieces of wall art on the “council houses”. Only a few of our council developments can rival these. Aberdeen has some and even Newcastle just manages this in Barrack Road (check). But Vienna’s council tenements built over many decades and in several styles are a treat.

As the day wore on and sustenance was required I treated myself to visits to two chains:
Nordsee[29] and the Anker baker chain. Two themes I should mention without chronology: churches and sex. The Austrians are by reputation conservative and Catholic. I can show sympathy to both. I went inside three Viennese churches. Stephansdom or St Stephen’s Cathedral, a church by the UNO City[30] and the one on Taborstrasse. The Cathedral I went in about 9.30pm. It was dark. Was there any electric light? It was full of people. What light there was came from thousands of votive candles at various stations. The people were all types. Plenty of youngish children were thronging the centre in family groups. Loud groups of teenagers were not in sight. Catholic churches in Austria are a visual feast such as the one found by sheer chance early on the Saturday morning in Taborstrasse. It was beautiful and I had it all to myself for my devotions leaving just as the caretaker arrived. The third church we had passed several times adjacent to the conference venue. I had observed a black cubic blob and had not thought more of it. On one passage I realized there was a stylized cross on it. Perhaps it was a church? It certainly was, very beautiful, quietly decorated, a symphony in wood inside, and again plenty of faithful simply praying. A good demeanour to have for a civilized city. Being inside each of these churches was ineffably sublime.

In what I found a strange but refreshing combination piety is combined with a frank expression of sexuality. It is impossible to travel for long around Vienna whether on foot, by tram or even on the Metro (its elevated sections) without seeing commercial sex. The examples whose threshold I crossed were smart, well designed and lit and comfortably full of normal people of both genders. The largest is at Mariahilfer Strasse 49[31] on one of Vienna’s major shopping streets. Yet I did not encounter sleaze or suggestions of criminality. Vienna seemed to be a very safe city. Confirmed perhaps when I returned to Westbahnhof on Saturday and found myself chatting to a couple of Dutch guys also waiting for the Amsterdam train. They had enjoyed Vienna but reckoned that compared to Amsterdam it was not edgy enough. That is fine by me. How Vienna balances these two themes: the Church and Sex in some sort of harmony could be a fascinating study.

What had brought me to strike up conversation with two Dutchmen? I have always liked the Netherlands. It is the European country that I know best and they all speak English. On this occasion the link was Rolls Royce. Were they bikers? Anyway, they were part of a crowd gazing at a very strange phenomenon that greeted me when the taxi driver left me outside the Westbahnhof about 7pm. There in the car park for the Motorail dock were about 30 assorted UK registered Rolls Royce and Bentley cars. Chatting to their drivers revealed that this was the Rolls Royce Enthusiast Club Central Southern Section[32] returning home from their annual rally. This had happened to take them to Vienna and they had contracted with the railways to use Motorail facilities out and back from Düsseldorf.

Imagine the sight: 30 of the most valuable cars in Western Europe about to be loaded onto a Motorail train. It was a spectator sight right up there with another interpretation of the action when on holiday last year at Mallaig and we had watched road making equipment for Knoydart being loaded very crudely over the hard at low tide in the harbour onto a modern day equivalent of the Puffer. After a lot of work the cars were loaded and the passengers got aboard. A crowd gathered to watch the departure. Someone from the railway had omitted a helpful instruction. The guard waved the flag, the engine hooted and the train began to leave. At which point many of the car alarm systems were activated by the jolt. To a chorus of squealing Rollers and flashing Bentleys, the express left the Westbahnhof. What a sight the train could have made through the night?

Perhaps the account of these days seems a bit surreal in parts. It was; not least when meeting a pack of feisty New York ladies who turned out to be members of the New York Philharmonic on their European tour. Coming back they were getting on the THALYS at Cologne when a group of muggers tried to steal one of the ladies' purses. Being who they were, the muggers got more than they bargained as a cellist punched the attacker on the nose, another member of the orchestra trapped the female aggressor in a train door, and the result was the mugger lost her own coat in the ensuing struggle and the members of the orchestra rescued their own possession (which I think had been put into the coat). The only thing stolen was the attacker's coat. My, these New York women are all they are cracked out to be. They came and sat beside me and I got the whole story.

Arrived in Brussels and perhaps the final three legs to Prudhoe would become a bit anti-climatic. Almost but not quite. The Eurostar leg was with a bargain first deal and passed comfortably and quietly. The complimentary light afternoon meal was a delight. A cheese board is something I find a struggle to pass by. Europe ends very suddenly when you leave St Pancras and its Eurostars and cross the road and instantly enter familiar Kings Cross and its 30 year old high speed diesel trains. Once again I went for the seating in the buffet car. This did not quite work. Sure, I found a window seat but the train at 4.30pm on a Sunday afternoon was busy with folk going home. Plenty of squaddies for Catterick and the individual who just had to discuss his love life loudly and in detail into his mobile home. Seated two or three rows away and every grisly detail was inescapable. Why do people not realise the folly of mobile phones? Too often this has happened to me or else it is business or professional details totally inappropriate for a public venue that are revealed.

Something else rather ominous began to develop on the express to Newcastle; something that would return me to the heart of the conference and Infoconnectivity. The weather in Vienna had been ideal. I had left Northern Europe with showers and a bad summer. As the train bordered the East Anglian Fens of my upbringing, the clouds began to tower. The ticket collector checked my ticket which was very significantly made out to Prudhoe CIV. Rain has closed the Tyne Valley line he told me, I would be on a bus from Newcastle. I was not unduly concerned. A little bit of inconvenience, this sort of thing had happened before. In fact the day before a moderately sizeable event had wreaked havoc in the North East. It seems it would have been impossible for the Tyne Valley line to have worked although local informants aver that the freight continued to pass through.

For whatever reason and although Sunday was a clearing up day and well known for the number of returning passengers seeking to get home, our train operator Northern had decided to abandon train operating in the Tyne Valley and would not in fact restore proper service until some time into Monday morning. This only became fully apparent to me when the train arrived 2 minutes early into Newcastle and 30 minutes before the Tyne Valley connection was due to leave.

I asked for the bus I had been promised to Prudhoe. A Natex station staff told me to go out to the front of the station and wait for the bus. There it was. We were told to board by a Trans-Pennine worker who should have had nothing to do with the job. "Where to Sir", "Prudhoe". And then it all went terribly wrong. I was told there was no service to Prudhoe, that the bus was only for Hexham, Haltwhistle and Carlisle. I said what about a taxi. This has been the normal performance before. I was told no provision for Prudhoe at all. Make your own way home. I was holding tickets worth £663 and I was being told to bog off. The CIV letters should have guaranteed my return home and they did not.

I went to see the station supervisor and he nicely told me the same and said blame Northern. I explained my own context a bit and he revealed to me that in his experience this decision to abandon Prudhoe and Wylam had not happened before. I can myself recollect one other occasion many years ago and I think after that there was a promise by whichever operator it was in those days never to do it again. But it had happened again. The station supervisor was not going to provide a taxi and he told me he had spent all day conveying this message to fed up customers for Tyne Valley Line stations. He was not happy, he did not think it was right. Infoconnectivity in practice was failing big time. As far as I could later tell, Prudhoe Station with its new interchange was fully accessible to taxis and buses throughout. Ovingham road bridge was not closed: a local indicator of how bad things are.

I needed explanations for why I was twice told there was bus provision to Prudhoe when there was not, why there was a refusal to provide a taxi or even a system which said, get a taxi yourself and send the bill into Northern. In the event I ran my wife to earth, just returned from driving home from Galloway and she came and collected me along with our eight year old daughter who could not be left home alone. None of us were happy. It was as if I had smoothly swanned around the public transport systems of Europe and come home to be told, you cannot escape British transport chaos. It was not the weather that is to blame but Northern’s management systems. It is entirely predictable that several times a year the line will be out of action and a prepared strategy for dealing with this ought to exist. The bus I saw even came from Prudhoe. A clear commitment not to abandon ticket holding passengers exists at several levels in the rules but that evening the rulebook had been thrown away. As I write, a meeting with senior Northern management has been sought and granted. I discovered that a good number of the regular users of the line had been similarly inconvenienced[33]. One couple had even also been returning long distance by Eurostar. In the end, anything is only as good as the people who make and operate it, whether the trains, the information and those whose job it is to link these to whatever actuality throws at them by way of impediment. That is INFOCONNECTIVITY.

Acknowledgements: Peter Simlinger of IIID and John Batts have done me the great courtesy of a detailed read-through offering helpful comment and correction.

word count 9,829
[1] The firsts:
Saw Prince Harry in the flesh? 06.30 ex Prudhoe, at Newcastle he went for the London train first class
Visit to St Pancras International
Travel on Eurostar and CTRL
Trip through the Channel Tunnel
Time in the centre of Brussels
Ever trip in a Sleeping Car – 2 of them
Journeys on the Donau Kurier and Orient Express trains
Ever journeys on SNCB, DB, ÖBB, WLB
Many new railway lines but very importantly : First travel through the Rhine Gorges – Saw Loreley rock, Bingen
Time away from Britain and Ireland since 1992
Time in Austria, Vienna, sight of the Danube
Time I saw a trainload of UK Rollers and Bentleys on a Motorail anywhere – Wien Westbahnhof
Time I ever met any members of the New York Philharmonic orchestra
Ever delivery of a paper or publicly spoke to a European audience
Four European Capitals within a week: Edinburgh, London, Brussels, Vienna

[2] In older times more romantically thought of as CIWL or Wagons-Lits, luxury sleeping car trains. Getting a bit more recent and into an era when the European railway administrations decided to fix international train services more directly there were the TEE and TEN trains: Trans-Europ-Express and Trans-Europ-Nacht networks.
[3] It is a complicated train which originating in Amsterdam has both Vienna and Milan as its destinations. It does this by splitting into two at Karlsruhe where it receives other coaches. At some point (Karlsruhe?) it is relabelled into the iconic name Orient Express. At least it left Vienna coming back as the Orient Express but had become the Donau Kurier again by Cologne. All of which opens up the fantastic complexity that the Infoconnectivity conference was considering. I should have been sitting in my cabin with Cook’s Continental Timetable to hand. In the event I ordered that after I got home because I was relying on being given a Reiseplan, a properly printed and attractive document which I assumed would be handed to me by the sleeping car attendant. All that has moved on. The digital age meant there was no information about the train journey on the train apart from the personalised itinerary details that DB had sent out with my tickets. I had the bare information about my journey but nothing about its context. It is a similar parallel argument with a paper map and a Tom-Tom satnav. The Amsterdam Vienna through train seems to have started in its current guise in 2004 by extending the already existing Donau Kurier to Amsterdam from Dortmund per Today’s Railways July 2004 p51.
[4] On the top deck of massive double deck sleeping carriage WLABm 61 85 06-90 301-1 coloured in the classic Wagon Lits blue. I think it is about 13 years old. Models at some price are made in HO Scale by Heris and LS Models and once you start deciding you want to buy a WLABm with the large Citynightline inscriptions quite a quest commences. For the afficionado we arrived in Vienna behind DB electric 101 048-7 and we had left Cologne behind a black MRCE Dispolok. The latter was possibly E 189 092 for that was portrayed on this working earlier in 2008 in Today’s Railways May 2008 p9.
[5] Per Peter Simlinger: “You were in a Vienna district informally named "Donau City" = "Danube City", part of which is the Vienna International Centre (home to one of the four duty stations of United Nations Headquarters - the other three are New York, Geneva and Nairobi)”.
[6] Peter Simlinger of IIID and Per Mollerup from Denmark
[7] “In Italy in May 1948, Auden wrote to Elizabeth Mayer: “I had’nt realised till I came how like Italy is to my “mutterland”, the Pennines””, this is from W. H Auden Pennine Poet by Alan Myers / Robert Forsythe p20.
[8] Of various Auden sources, the bibliography which best connects the various themes is Humphrey Carptenter’s W .H. Auden e.g p387.
[9] http://www.seat61.com/ is the website and there is a book (ordered on my return!). It confirmed that my route choice was the preferred one and to anyone contemplating the UK Vienna journey by rail I strongly recommend consulting the website and the book before you make your arrangements. I consulted the website after I had booked but before I travelled.
[10] That travel is inherently an uncertain activity demanding a readiness to improvise was confirmed as I wrote up this essay. At 2.57pm on the 11th September, a fire broke out in a lorry shuttle train in the Channel Tunnel. For the second time (18th November 1996 was the first) a significant fire wreaked havoc with the structure and schedules of the tunnel. Had my travel occurred a week later, I would have reached Vienna and then been wondering how to get home. At around 1am on the 12th September the UK’s third largest tour operator called the XL group went bust leaving around 80,000 customers in limbo.
[11] Train designers who set out to ape an aeroplane cabin with their carriage are beyond the pale to me.
[12] Using the 8.04am from Prudhoe.
[13] The Bruxelles route may add some miles but it involves no change of stations unlike Paris.
[14] The Electric Railway That Never Was by R. A. S. Hennesey, Oriel Press, 1970 and several other books on the NER electrics.
[15] See feature in Today’s Railways 10 p32ff.
[16] The Belgiums lack of enthusiasm for being Belgium has often been discussed. More than 50 years ago Roger Pilkington examined this and the quite marked differences with The Netherlands in his Small Boat Through Belgium, MacMillan, 1957 p147ff.
[17] John Cockerill is probably the key link between our Northern Valleys and Liege see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockerill .
[18] We are back to Auden here. Our train passed close to Plombières and even nearer to Moresnet. For a hundred years 1816-1920 the Drielandenpunt had been a four land point because Moresnet was the centre of a microstate brought into being by issues of mineral extraction. The lead company was the Vielle Montagne Zinc Company. This Belgium concern came to own the North Pennine Nenthead mines just an hour from our home. In turn Nenthead was one of Auden’s key reference points and appears in his play The Enemies of a Bishop as Stunhead and the company renamed as the Old Mountain Lead Company. European history, my railway journey and a poet seem as interlinked as a DNA strand. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moresnet .
[19] See feature in Today’s Railways 10 p32ff for the railways of Aachen.
[20] See feature on the start of Citynightline “Hotels on wheels” in Today’s Railways 7 p26ff.
[21] The location of a classy piece of the Vienna Succession style from 1905. http://www.alma-mahler.com/engl/gallery/spielort_wien.html . Note how a name with its own rhythm takes us from a train to a building, a high piece of architecture. The URL takes us from the building immediately into the heart of Austrian 20th c. culture and one of its central charismatic figures. A lady who in the late 1940s and 50s is in New York. Would she have met W. H. Auden? The entwining links of people, culture, buildings and travel are everywhere in Vienna.
[22] A good portrayal of all Vienna’s railway systems is in Today’s Railways August 1996 p30ff: “Railways in Wien” by David Haydock.
[23] http://www.chester-le-track.co.uk/
[24] James Cousins: British Rail Design, Danish Design Council, Copenhagen, 1986.
[25] This little detail comes from a fantastic resource Railway, Identity, Design & Culture by Keith Lovegrove, Laurence King Publishing, 2004, p141
[26] Time and the Timetable at http://www.railwayprintsociety.org.uk/Newsletter%20sample%20article%20-%20Time%20%20the%20Timetable.pdf . Also see Today’s Railways November 2003 p15 and February 2004 p7 for important references about the end of European printed timetables and the Austrian experience in particular. UIC member railways were obliged to print a system timetable for the public until 2002 and since then the progress of abandonment has been steady. In 2008 it might surprise you that one place that still enthusiastically offers a printed system timetable is Ireland. ÖBB and SNCB for instance do not.
[27] Familiar to film lovers as a setting in the British 1949 film, a thriller called The Third Man.
[28] The Forsythe Collection includes a superb 16 side brochure on linson paper called Tunnel issued in 1968 in German by the municipality of Vienna which fully details this development.
[29] http://www.nordsee.at/flash.jsc

[30] Per Peter Simlinger: “The church is referred to as "UNO- City-Kirche" (UNO City Church). Its official name is: "Christus, Hoffnung der Welt" (= "Christ, aspiration/hope of the world").
[31] To be convinced that Viennese sex shops are well presented, clean and employ a lighting consultant look at http://www.ps.tv/down/erotic_store_concept.pdf and the images of Sexworld Vienna and Spartacus Vienna. The website appears to be a design manual for the genre. The source for the Gay Guide to Vienna discussed in this paper was another major and respected chain: Beate Uhse in Wahringergurtel 164.
[32] http://www.chichesterweb.co.uk/rrec/rr02news.htm
[33] 37 formal complaints on the Saturday and 8 for the Sunday. The meeting took place and the Northern managers assured myself and the Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group that what happened should never have happened and that protocols will be developed to ensure it cannot happen again. In general I have found Northern an organisation willing to reflect on its processes and it has handled positively a considerable growth in its business.

New Public Transport Advert

2009-03-29T00:41:00.000-07:00

New Public Transport Advert

This is the new advert that Specialist Auctions has designed to support public transport listings. It will be used in Buses magazine May dated issue published in April and should attract interest. This is both an excellent time to buy such items (before more buyers arrive) and an excellent time to prepare for the rush if you have items to list. The advert is flexible and could well be appearing in other venues and media.

Model Memorabilia

2009-03-07T05:23:00.000-08:00

Over on Yahoo a new group has appeared. It is called the
Toy Train Paper and Memorabilia Group . Setting up this group is a good idea. Model memorabilia has long been an interest of mine. And although most of the Forsythe Collection of Transport and Travel Publicity has been purchased by the National Railway Museum in York UK, the model memorabilia was excluded. We must have about 25 shelf feet of this material and a lot of duplicates.

Some of you may recognise my name from Model Rail and other British magazines. I write a great deal about model history. My last Model Rail feature reviewed 1959 and used a deal of memorabilia. For those who wish to find out more about what we do, our own extensive website is http://www.forsythe.demon.co.uk/ and there is a also a blog at: http://robertatforsythe.blogspot.com/
Look at that and the scope of what we sent to York can be seen.With the spare items I use Specialist Auctions to find new homes. This is a search on LGB . But searches on Marklin, Lledo, Trix, Peco will get results as well. An older piece available is from the Model Railway Club and from these leads, a lot more material can be found.

Other folk do list on Specialist Auctions like Jimanato who has many old modelling magazines available. We both show a good number of feedbacks which should give buyers confidence. Interesting Treasures is another vendor with this material and there are a further number who list actual models. bwarcher is one of those and he lists catalogues amongst his items. They also show up with his other identity as tetedevapeur.

Anyone wishing to sell this sort of memorabilia will find a category readily available: http://www.specialistauctions.com/categories.php?parent=5773 or Category: Toys & Models > Railways & Trains > Literature & Catalogues . Listing on Specialist Auctions is very advantageous to the vendor as a check on the terms and conditions will show.

Major James Forsythe MBE TD on-line references

2009-03-04T04:22:00.000-08:00

Having in the previous post mentioned that much of the Forsythe Collection is now at York and the National Railway Museum, it is a good complement to mention my father's material. He was instrumental in a number of waterway and ship preservation projects between 1949-2004. Fortunately some on-line resources apart from our own website http://www.forsythe.demon.co.uk/ are now appearing for him. I clip in two urls:

http://www.wherryalbion.com/page11.htm

and

http://nrocat.norfolk.gov.uk/Dserve/dserve.exe?dsqServer=128.60.0.31&dsqIni=dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqPos=0&dsqSearch=((text)=forsythe)
The first is a nice tribute from the Norfolk Wherry Trust and the second is the Norfolk Record Office summary catalogue of his papers. Much that is there nicely amplifies what is in the Forsythe Collection at York, Prudhoe and Cambridge (details in the link).

The Forsythe Collection has moved to York

2009-02-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

This is a major moment worth bringing to folk's attention. The majority of the Forsythe Collection of Transport and Travel Ephemera has been purchased by the National Railway Museum at York. It will be accessible to the public through their Search Engine facility. The picture accompanying is NRM copyright and shows about half of the collection in its new home. A brief introduction to what you will find in the collection which is upwards of 125,000 pieces is available.

Lighthouse

2009-01-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

I moderate certain auctions on www.specialistauctions.com . One of my own lighthouse lots is http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1262065 but I was impressed when I searched the site and by entering Lighthouse returned 124 hits. These ranged from postcards, through stamps to publications. Amongst the publications :FAMOUS LIGHTHOUSE HISTORY OF THE OLD WESTItem ID: 1258248 caught my attention as it seemed like a good opportunity to obtain an old periodical article focussing on the subject. Lighthouses often appeal to maritime enthusiasts but can also be relevant to civil engineering fans and family history researchers. The item referenced certainly hits these interests. Do you have anything more to offer related to Lighthouses? And if you list on Specialist Auctions remember to use your free second category. A lighthouse collectable might be a postage stamp, it might fit the geneaology category but do make sure it appears somewhere in the Collectables Nauticalia headings.

Can you sell on Specialist Auctions?

2008-10-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I am Robert Forsythe and in this blog I hope to describe the practical ways by which I have made selling on Specialist Auctions work. There will be comparisons with the inevitable market leader but I hope they will be realistic and invective free. My online trading uses the nick robertatforsythe. Every vendor will have their own rationale but I want my buyers to easily find and recognise me in the areas in which I trade.

http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1119825

I joined ebay on the 4th February 2000 and Specialist Auctions on 29th June 2006. October 22nd 2008 was a significant date in my Specialist Auctions relationship. I recorded my 400th sale and 275th piece of positive feedback. By that date we had 1324 items live. The ebay feedback comparison was 4168 on feedback, all positives on both sites.

The number crunching is significant. ebay set out to be a market place where niche traders would flourish and for a long time I found that to be so. I think however that that ground has shifted. The litmus test is simple: could I afford to keep 1300+ lots live on ebay until they sold. The answer must be pretty obvious: no way. In itself that is not ebay's "fault". It is a consequence of what I sell and this is the education bit. What do you want to sell? And how long does it need in the market place before it will find a buyer? In my case, I have a good supply of highly Specialist material for which there are a limited number of buyers but those buyers are themselves usually dedicated and determined people who know their subject. They may want to spread their spending. I am active in a low cost collecting field. Have I ever sold any individual lot on Specialist for more than £10? No and I don't think any of my individual lots on ebay have fetched more than £100. We are not high value sellers but we are selling material that in the main cost nothing to obtain and usually ends up in the bin (draw a comparison to Reginald Perrin and grot). The point is because most of the time it ends up in the bin, used and abused, the items that survive gain interest.

We explained a lot about this in a blog for Ephemera . Very roughly speaking for every four items I have uploaded onto Specialist, one has sold. Apart from my time (which is the major cost), uploading items onto Specialist has been free. When there is a sale, the fee structure is straightforward at 3%. Failure to sell has not incurred a penalty. The logic says Specialist Auctions is playing a long game. Build up what you have to offer so that your lists show plenty of choice. The chance is someone interested will always then find something that connects to them. It has taken time. The growth to 1300 lots has taken over two years because we do have a life outside on line auctions! Given time, we guess we could quite easily reach a figure of 5000 lots. It is having that rich realm of choice that has grown business. The feedback will show many of the buyers keep on coming back to more. Inevitably positive relationships with individuals who bought from my other listings have been established. ebay cannot stop its vendors getting to know their own customers directly! Those individuals have had the confidence to move their business. But like all good business this revolves around trust and communication. Generally, when I upload lots I have one or two potential buyers in mind. I will often send them a positive alert. I will ask a regular buyer to tell me about their collecting interests and their requests so that when material surfaces I can think of them.

http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1215560

Words about start prices are important. Elsewhere the urge is on setting a low start price. If your lot does not sell, you will be financially penalised and the hope is that a low start attracts buyers. But if the item is a niche item and the buyers are simply not there that week or miss your lot in the sheer bulk of choice, what is the point in listing at 99p start? Specialist Auctions is offering a more measured and less frenetic model.

This is my pricing philosophy. On the criteria of time spent, time listing, time packing and posting, it is not really comfortable to sell a lot for a £1-£1.50. My rough rule of thumb is that a lot needs to realise £3 for me to think that was worth the effort. With Specialist Auctions you can do this. You can set a range of pricing from a realistic, not necessarily bargain basement start price and end at a higher snap it up. Usually my lots show a price range this way between the minimum price that I am comfortable with and what on a good day I do think a lot can achieve. After all, the joy of Specialist Auctions is the sheer flexibility. If the buyer thinks differently and if you have clicked the right box, a haggle can develop. Some people are uncomfortable with this, but there is no obligation to participate and no obligation for the vendor to agree. Many of my sales have been haggles and often in the median range between the two prices shown on the listing. Sometimes I have been persuaded to settle for less than the start price. It can happen. Not often, I usually resist. But if the low haggle is in the context of someone placing a considerable order over a number of lots, it may be considered. Where you decide to end a haggle is often a question of the business context that you have with the other party.

If you are reading this and wondering whether to start listing with Specialist Auctions my summary advice: are you prepared to give the task time? Be patient, be prepared to keep on uploading to build up presence, it will not cost you money. Do you have other outlets where you can draw attention to what you are doing? Do you have an already existing customer base who you know and with whom you communicate? Remember that Specialist Auctions offers a good number of real people keen to help. Nosing around the forum discussions will show that.
Accompanying the blog will be several illustrations which give chapter and verse for actual realisations over the last few months on Specialist Auctions from our material.

Left is sale no 400, sold for £2.95 on 22nd October 2008 as Specialist Auctions no. 1066403.

Ephemera - an interview

2008-09-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

I have had the privilege of an interview on Ephemera. Check it out at

http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/2008/09/the-forsythe-co.html

Isle of Man

2008-09-22T10:39:00.001-07:00

I just searched Isle of Man on Specialist Auctions and got 241 results from inputting Isle Man. That is a good return. The 30 mile long Isle of Man is widely recognised as a beautiful tourist island in the middle of the Irish Sea. It has a long and proud history. Tynwald claims to be the the oldest continually running Parliament in the world. It was an island settled by the Vikings whose influence is still apparent. A version of a Celtic language is Manx. Another very identifiable symbol is the three legs of Man symbolising the difficulty of overthrowing the Manxmen. Yet another classic image of the island is the Laxey Wheel, the Lady Isabella. This huge waterwheel has been a tourist attraction ever since it was built around 1854 to drain the lead mines. Passengers on the Snaefell Mountain Railway have a good view as they pass to the 2036' mountain summit from where on a good day five kingdoms are on view. That railway is just one of five vintage systems left in operation. The railways have produced plenty of collectables as have the shipping and aviation lines that have served the island. The island plays up to its history and Manx stamps and coins are collectables in their own right. I am about to upload the item just above which is a newsletter about these from a couple of years ago just when they celebrated their own car building industry. This was the Peel microcar made in that little fishing port around 1960. Amongst the 241 listings were many of my own for ephemera from the railways, buses and ships serving the islands. More unusual items cover a competitor to the Steam Packet (another good search) called Norwest who worked from Fleetwood. The Laxey Wheel, Steam Packet ships and the railways readily appear in some of the stamps being listed. There are even Manx stamps on offer produced for use in mainland Britain during one of our postal strikes. The term Manxman is a good search as it covers one of the most famous ships which before it ceased working in 1982 became a film star in Chariots of Fire. The Tourist Trophy TT, Manx Grand Prix or Six Day Trials are worth searching for. These refer to the motor cycle races for which the island is famous. I can offer shipping handbills covering these operations and there are stamps and covers available from other vendors ( TT Races as a search got results). A number of attractive first day covers from the island are on offer from Specialist Auctions. A newish function is that the Isle of Man has its own heading now in Books>History>Local History>Isle of Man so hopefully that can grow. All in all we are not doing the island badly but we will as ever welcome more bidders and vendors.

Windermere

2008-09-18T09:18:00.001-07:00

Lake Windermere is the best known of the four main lakes of the British lake district. I define main in a clever way by the lakes on which scheduled passenger boat services have worked. By this score Ullswater, Derwentwater and Coniston are the others. The Lake District is a British National Park and a centre of National Trust activity. An abundant literature including famous poets like Wordsworth and Auden and range of collectables is bound to follow. Various items can be found through Specialist including (not from me) Goss ware, other china, and postcards. Search Windermere, Lake District, Lakeside, Ullswater and you will soon get results. My special take is transport paperwork from the area and I can offer a wide range from the vintage to the recent. Windermere is especially well served. The illustration is one of my lots, the 1960 timetables. I have material on offer from the late 1950s forwards. Old handbills, a very attractive sequence of brochures, even from this 21st century, they continue to be attractive, some tickets, can all be found. There is also the Cumbria full public transport timetable, a now deceased beast. Material from the Lakeside & Haverthwaite railway connects to the bottom end of Windermere whilst a Ravenglass search takes you over to the famous miniature railway on the western edges of the Lake District and to the standard gauge coastal railway which is very scenic as it runs between the sea and the mountains. The old names for the area were Cumberland, Furness and Westmorland and each of these as a search will reveal more material. Happy hunting.

2008-08-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the start of this blog. It may acquire an independent life of its own but at the outset it is a placeholder to cement my place in the system and to link to the other incentive to be here which was a response to an invitation to blog on What's New at Specialist Auctions (so look that one up). What I have done though is to drop in posts made at that blog and consolidate them here. Our big interest (of several) is transport and travel ephemera so do check out our own website www.forsythe.demon.co.uk or www.fionnconsultancy.co.uk .

Friday, August 22, 2008

High Speed Train Intercity 125 HST

First of all a welcome as this is my first contribution to the Specialist Auction blog. For a topic I've chosen one of the most popular of the subjects that I sell. Anything related to the Intercity 125 or HST trains that have run around on Britain's railways since 1976. To get an idea of what I sell covering the subject a search on Specialist for High Speed Train or Intercity 125 should always get some results. We will usually be able to offer some timetables or leaflets from the first few years with a good assortment later on. These trains have since privatisation operated in many different liveries and trying to find official literature for all these options can be quite challenging. Cross Country, Midland Main Line, GNER or First Great Western are all searches which should produce more results relevant to the HST train and with any luck an HST model might be available from another vendor on Specialist.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

There's no doubt that one of the big areas of my interest, both for my own collecting and for what I sell is the Irish Sea. Believe it or not, only a fraction of the material available for other collectors is yet listed but already there is plenty of choice on Specialist Auctions. The story of how this area of the collection grew is interesting. A book was part of the process. I am an author as my own website http://www.forsythe.demon.co.uk/ explains. One of the books which I have written is Irish Sea Shipping Publicised and yes, you can get signed copies via Specialist at http://www.specialistauctions.com/auctiondetails.php?id=1055557 . Another day I will post about the limited but select books that we vend via Specialist. For now, back to the Irish Sea. The book was written, and as a result, another author made contact and the upshot was that I was offered the Raymond Brandreth collection. Raymond had unfortunately passed away but he had a very good innings from his base at Meols on the Wirral during which he cruised happily with a Contactors ticket on the Isle of Man Steam Packet, Liverpool and North Wales' St Tudno, P & A Campbell etc. And on his trips he packed up handfulls of paperwork. We have been selling from his collection since 2003 and much has moved on. If this interests you, recommended searches which bring up results quickly on Specialist would be Irish Sea, Steam Packet, Norwest, Heysham, Holyhead, Liverpool & North Wales, Belfast, Llandudno, White Funnel, Wirral, Mersey. By the time you have done that I am sure you will have the picture.

robertatforsythe

Parenting

A pat on the back for New Year 2012

The Courant explains why the Prudhoe Town Centre determination was cancelled

Information about the Prudhoe Town Centre

Is the Prudhoe Town Centre redevelopment abandoned and if so Why?

Prudhoe's Drainage

Tales from our National Parks

The Last Battle

Northern's great strengthening.

The Shepherds Dene Ramble Retreat

Prudhoe Town Centre meeting aftermath

The Prudhoe Town Centre Meeting 5th September 2009

Guy Opperman's Charity Walk

Sequencing Prudhoe's new town centre

Peter Hetherington

Is this a priceless advert or what?

Imported from my Facebook 2nd August 2011

Robert Forsythe For those interested in the Prudhoe redevelopment, keeping a regular eye over the Northumberland Estates pages may be useful http://www.northumberlandestat​es.co.uk/news.php?id=260

Ludlow and Prudhoe

Another public meeting about the town centre?

Murdoch

Prudhoe's town centre, the community partnership and the Courant

Some aphrorisms

Lie

When good is not good enough.

Passengers Go Away

Nene Valley Railway Edmondson tickets

Holiday on the Buses

Opencast Mines I have known

Virtually seeing some of the Collection

Big Catholic Buildings: Cork Lee Road

Save Chopwell Wood Sunday 13th February

Hexham Big Society Summit 11th February 2011

Of prisoners, pirates and society.

The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley

The L&YR and the ner

Multi-Culturalism

Prudhoe Priest reads the last rites?

Is the North Losing out on Transport?

Mark 4:25

Ebchester Bank

Ushaw College

Go North East, Facebook and IID

Trying to keep a town bus service

Don't believe Radio Newcastle about Metrocentre trains

Ovingham Middle School Shut 3rd December

Look North 29.11.10 The bus that did'nt stop

The Media Phenomenon which is Go North East's Facebook pages

A great timetable meets its maker

The Hanging Gardens of Prudhoe AKA Prudhoe Town centre Redevelopment

Tea Rooms of East Tynedale

Westward Bound opens a new shop

York Northern Timetable Development Stakeholder Workshop 23.9.2010

Luxury Tour Trains

Reached 50 and reached Killhope Cross

Nearing 50

Transport, tickets and specialist collecting magazines.

The Great Gating Debate on Britain's railways

Collecting leaflets is much more fun than downloading websites

Easter Saturday 2009 at Garsdale

Ina Steiner's editorial: the future for online niche vendors

Railway Postcards and Photographs

Vienna: a note

Vienna: A Sugar Icing Confection

New Public Transport Advert

Model Memorabilia

Major James Forsythe MBE TD on-line references

The Forsythe Collection has moved to York

Lighthouse

Can you sell on Specialist Auctions?

Ephemera - an interview

Isle of Man

Windermere

Robert Forsythe
For those interested in the Prudhoe redevelopment, keeping a regular eye over the Northumberland Estates pages may be useful http://www.northumberlandestates.co.uk/news.php?id=260