#National Railway Museum York

[trainphilos]

...of Anoraks, Pufferküsser and Tragics!

A short foreword and explanation: My friend Michael in London has been doing a blog since blogs became a thing. He started out to review, comment on and complain about all things Apple. Hence the blog’s URL: www.macfilos.com. However over the years his obsession with photography and cameras, in particular Leica equipment, became the main focus of his blog. The blog name stayed the same, but it is…

[todayintokyo]

Happy 60th birthday to a legend! The Tōkaidō Shinkansen began service on 1 October 1964, using the 0 Series pictured above. I took the photo in the National Railway Museum in York, England. It's the only shinkansen outside Japan.

[rabbitcruiser]

Toronto became the capital of Ontario on September 28, 1867. 

[this-wandering-mind]

15. 3. 24

National railway museum, York

[cephalostrations]

York National Railway Museum Photo-dump

28.8.24

I don't think the Flying Scotsman was there [uwe uwe uwe soung of crying] but the trains were so big and cool I forgot about being sad :)

[carbone14]

Locomotive LMS Princess de la classe Coronation ‘Duchess of Hamilton’ - National Railway Museum - York - Angleterre - 1er juin 2009

Photo de David Ingham

[nightbringer24]

York National Railway Museum.

Part 7

[guerrerense]

Replica of the Rocket,National Railway Museum,York por berenice carroll

[mortal-perspective]

[marvinjob]

Day 13: Friday, September 20

[frimleyblogger]

Hardwick’s Great Hall

The splendour that was the Great Hall of #EustonStation #railwayana

The success of the London and Birmingham line prompted other lines from the Midlands and the North East to use the Euston terminus as their gateway to London, putting pressure on the already rudimentary facilities of the station. It might have had an impressive but purely decorative propylaeum but the directors of the newly formed London and North Western Railway Company (L&NWR) wanted to build…

[warrenwoodhouse]

NRM National Railway Museum, York, Yorkshire, UK. - 17th May 2018

Add photos here

Photos and videos by @warrenwoodhouse

📸 Nikon D3300 DSLR

🗓 17th May 2018

📍 NRM National Railway Museum, Lehman Road, York, Yorkshire, North, England, United Kingdom.

[trollprincess]

So I have a friend from high school who is a cop. (Yes, I KNOW.) I shared a photo on Facebook of a packed highway of people attempting to evacuate from Hurricane Milton, all while the lanes going in the opposite direction were open and empty. And my Facebook post was basically me screaming, “Open the other side of the highway and reverse it so that people can GET OUT.”

His response was essentially, “Yeah, that is *really* difficult for us to do.” Not in a condescending way, because he genuinely isn’t a huge asshole. (Yes, I KNOW.)

And then I may have vented in my response, in which I tried not to imply that the police were a problem. Because to be honest, I don’t see this as a police problem. I see this as how we have fucked ourselves as a nation by making ourselves so dependent on cars.

There is that poll on this site – or multiple polls, at this point – asking how long people can tolerate being in their cars. And the thing is, Americans (and Canadians as well, I am imagining) have almost no other options. We have to be used to spending a good 12 hours in a car without breaking a sweat. Everything in this country is built around being in a car. There’s a reason when you ask us how far away a place is from somewhere else, we normally give that distance in hours and not miles.

Air travel sucks. It sucks for a multitude of reasons – cost, the hassle of dealing with security, the time suck, etc. – and in an emergency, only a select few are going to be able to use it to get away from a hurricane. And that’s one of the few disasters where air travel is an optional escape.

Train travel sucks. Amtrak is not something you’re gonna be complaining about if you’re trying to get away from whatever disaster you need to evacuate from. But next to so many other countries, Amtrak looks like we’ve been receiving other countries’s leftover railway systems from the 70s. It also doesn’t go everywhere. I live in northeastern Pennsylvania near Scranton, which prides itself on its history in the train industry. We have a museum and everything. We have multiple things named after that museum, including the Steamtown marathon which is happening tomorrow.

Can you get on a passenger train in Scranton? Nope.

(The main argument against this always seems to be that people will come here from New York City and commit crimes, which is hilarious considering if somebody wanted to come here from New York City and commit crimes it’s only a 2.5-hour drive.)

Anyway, disasters.

If the only option you’re gonna give most people to get out of areas of Florida that are being targeted by hurricanes or areas of California that suffer from wildfires or places in the Midwest that face flooding are cars, then we need a better fucking emergency management system regarding transportation in this country. You can’t just sit there and mock people for not evacuating because they can’t or won’t when getting away from Milton meant sitting on highway for hours with absolutely no gas stations whatsoever nearby having any gas at all. (It just makes me think of those photos of people stranded on the highway in their cars in blizzards where people are like, “Now imagine imagine how bad it would be if all of those cars were electric!“ Well, all of those cars in that photo in that blizzard run on gas and they’re fucking stranded, sooooooo.)

Look, we can change the transportation system in this country. we did it before and we can do it again. We used to have more train options, fewer highways. My small hometown had a fucking trolley in the 40s. Now, if you don’t have a car here, you’re stuck. You can’t even get Uber here. if a wildfire started here and surrounded the town, it would be a clusterfuck.

Regardless of how you feel about the police, if police and fire departments in this country cannot organize an evacuation on a highway in a way that will reduce the backup so that tens of thousands of people aren’t sitting in their cars when a hurricane hits, that’s a problem – not just for those people, but for the police, and the fire department, and emergency management in general.

The people in charge of emergency management are just people, just human. I’m researching the Camp Fire in 2018 right now, and you had a bunch of people calling 911 saying, “I can see a huge fire off to the east. Are we safe? Should we evacuate?” The 911 operators could only work off the information they had. They could have told people to evacuate earlier, but Cal Fire didn’t anticipate the strength of the fire. Which is understandable. Nobody could anticipate the strength of that fire. But the 911 operators were sitting in an office with no windows, and they had no idea what was going on the east. They couldn’t look out and see exactly what was happening. If they could have, they probably would have told people to leave as soon as possible much sooner than they were told to. Instead, they waited for official confirmation, and when they did start telling people to evacuate, traffic managed to back up in a small town of 25,000 people until many of them were trapped in an unimaginable hellscape.

When people need to evacuate from a disaster, and they stay instead, far too many people - including those in positions of power – just kind of wave their hands and say, “Well, we tried.” No, we didn’t. This country made not trying its watchword, and now we’re at a point where unless you own a car, which is a luxury a lot of people cannot afford in this economy, escaping from disaster is impossible. So you can get in your car or somebody else’s car and go sit on a highway and hope your gas doesn’t run out, since none of the gas stations for 100 miles have any gas to give you, or you can stay in your house and hope you don’t die.

Sometimes, I really wish somebody would make me the head of the department of transportation. I would demand an absurd amount of money to build a better train system, to provide better transportation options for smaller towns, to provide extensive training for rescue personnel in managing evacuations like the clusterfuck in Florida this week. I would become an absolute fucking nuisance to Congress. I would be asking for money left and right to make it so that our only options as Americans weren’t to get into cars we can barely afford these days and attempt to organize our own evacuations from the growing number of natural disasters in this country.

Y’all keep posting these polls about how long you can tolerate being in a car at the same time that tens of thousands of Floridians were sitting on highways trying to get away from Tampa so they wouldn’t die in a hurricane.

We can tolerate being in a car all goddamn day. It’s because we don’t have a fucking choice, even when it’s life or death.

[rabbitcruiser]

Toronto became the capital of Ontario on September 28, 1867. 

[joezworld]

I did a Christmas

I wrote a Christmas story. It is of considerable length. @mean-scarlet-deceiver helped considerably in its creation.

No, you don't get it all at once. Also, I'm not tagging it any differently because a lot happens in this! If you want to find out, you gotta read it. (And put tags in your reblogs so I can see what you think of it. Please.)

June, 1985

The mail came over the span of a month. It came as postcards, letters, overstuffed mailers, and packages that weighed “a bloody ton!”

They came from as near as Cumbria and as far away as Western Australia. 

The paper ranged from lined yellow notebook paper to cream-colored heavy cardstock, and everything in between. 

Letterhead was common: SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON. Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, Hemel Hempstead. Hamersley Iron, Port Dampier, Western Australia. NATIONAL RAILWAY MUSEUM, YORK. Government of Ontario Transit, Union Station, Toronto. North Yorkshire Moors Railway, 12 Park Street, Pickering, North Yorkshire, YO18 7AJ.

Bluebell Railway, Sheffield Park Station, East Sussex

Vale of Rheidol Railway, Park Avenue, Aberystwyth

Great Central Railway, Loughborough

H.P. Bulmers Railway Centre, Hereford

-

They were typed and hand-written in equal measure. Some were obviously transcribed verbatim. Others had notes from the oftentimes unwilling stenographer peppered throughout. One contained a second sheet of paper, informing the recipient that the author had been so enraged that he’d insisted on writing the letter himself. 

The letters started off normally, 

“Dear Oliver…”

“Duck,”

“7101” 

“Montague,”

“Ollie…”

“Brother,”

-

“I hope that this letter finds you well.”

“I’m pleased to hear you’re alright.”

“Let me start by saying that I’d be there myself if I were able.”

“THANK GOD THAT YOU ARE OKAY.”

“This will be a short letter. A longer one may follow.”

-

But very quickly grew… boisterous. 

“I cannot believe what’s happened.”

“I’m blindingly upset on your behalf!”

“How dare he.”

“IT IS UNBELIEVABLE THAT HE DID IT, AND YET HE DID.”

“[I don’t know what she said next but it sounded really angry]”

“Trust me when I say that I am going to deal with him.”

“-it exceeds any kind of disrespect amongst engines that I have ever heard of.”

“I had never even assumed one of their kind could stoop so low…”

“With that out of the way, let me be the first inmate to welcome you to the asylum...” 

[scotianostra]

On 24th February 1923, the world famous steam train, the Flying Scotsman, went into service.

From the 1920s the train was considered the height of luxury. Onboard there were first-class restaurant facilities, a cocktail bar and radio equipment, so passengers could hear the horse-racing results.

There was even a hairdressing salon where men could have their facial hair shaved with an open razor, made possible because the barber's chair was set in such a position that there would be "no jolting". I'm not sure I would have a shave in a moving train!

The train's hairdresser was reportedly known as "Sweeney Todd of the Rails", given his precarious trade.

In 1928 the train broke the record for the longest regular non-stop train journey in the world, when the LNER ran an express service for the entire 393-mile route.

This record would last until 1948, when, unintentionally, the train broke its own record. The Flying Scotsman ran for 408 and a half miles in May of that year when flood damage to the main line caused diversions via St Boswells and Kelso.

Throughout World War II The Flying Scotsman was one of the few titled trains that continued to operate along the East Coast - it carried troops between London and Scotland, although the headboards and roofboards were removed for security.

And, on 21st June 1958, in a historic move which would signal the decline of steam, The Flying Scotsman was hauled for the first time by a diesel locomotive.

The service is currently run by government-owned East Coast.

In May 2011 they relaunched the service, painting one of their locomotives, the Class 91 No. 91101 with Flying Scotsman branding.

At the launch East Coast said the move was "part of our policy of bringing back train names and restoring pride, passion and even a touch of glamour and romance back to the East Coast railway".

It's not all a romantic journey though, just last September there was, what the called a "slow speed” crash with another heritage train hours before visitors were due to board it.

It happened lwhen the ocomotive was being shunted into place to be coupled with the Royal Scotsman train carriages, which were stationary.

A spokesman for Royal Scotsman train owner Belmond described the collision as “minor” and said there had been no major injuries.

"We are grateful for the prompt attendance by paramedics who were on site to assist the few passengers and team members who sustained minor injuries,” the spokesman said.

"One passenger and one team member are attending hospital for a precautionary check-up.

"All passengers have been transferred to a hotel where our team is on standby to offer support and to assist with our guests’ onward travel arrangements."

Last year ater travelling 10,000 miles across the UK as part of its centenary celebrations, world famous locomotive Flying Scotsman will spend the first part of 2024 on static display at the National Railway Museum in York before resuming rail tours later in the year.

The custodianship of The Flying Scotsman is up for tender later this year, so by this time next year I may be telling you about new "owners"