No 778, a WW1 Baldwin, makes a fine sight accelerating away from Page’s Park station on the Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway.
It’s the Industrial Railway Society’s AGM – before the meeting, there’s a trip up the line – and before the trip up the line, there are a couple of “false starts”, just for photographers. Great stuff!
More photos will eventually appear on “Geoff’s Rail Diaries” – but not tonight…
It’s a dry and mild afternoon, with the chance of some sunshine. The field paths continue to be worth avoiding, but there are quiet tracks and lanes north of Morville. The drive to Aldenham Park looks private, but it forms a public footpath, which leads to the unsurfaced track to the pools at Hurst Farm. From here onwards, we’re on a hard surface. We return to Morville along roads which, like so many others in these parts, are very quiet.
After yesterday’s torrents, today would be bright and sunny – until mid-afternoon. More rain was forecast, coming from the south-west. We’d better head north-east to make the most of it – somewhere that perhaps wouldn’t be too bad underfoot. So it proved, despite the path down to the valley being a stream. Most of the water had behaved reasonably well, even the large puddles here and there could be circumnavigated easily. None of that deep sloppy mud we’d struggled with around Croft Ambrey…
We’d been up here a few weeks ago, so we planned a circuit mostly to the south of our earlier route, though there is some overlap. Again, we walked anti-clockwise – down beside the brook – this time on the opposite bank – then back up to the plateau, returning to the car mostly along the trackbed of the “Tackeroo railway”, the military railway built to serve the camps up here during the first world war. The sun had behaved quite well too, disappearing finally behind the advancing clouds as we set off home, the first spots of rain falling not many minutes later.
Tackeroo – The Military Railway on Chasewater Stuff’s Railway & Canal Blog
I’ve been using Blogger for some time (more than five years) – perhaps I should have a look at WordPress? I’ve imported the old Blogger content – clearly, it will need some tidying up.
Think of this for now, as “work in progress”. In the meantime, visit geoffspages blog on Blogger
I started putting up video clips in the late 1990s – very short, very small and pretty low quality – those were the days of dialup connections – and analogue video – and a video capture card… Not to mention the time it took on my old 486 to process each clip.
Broadband and YouTube, and the advent of digital camcorders, have revolutionised online video, and for the last 18 months or so I’ve been uploading video to the YouTube site. More recently, I found time to digitise all the old Video8 tapes, recorded between 1994 and 2000 (I was worried that they would be deteriorating). Having done that, I began to replace all the remaining “old” WMV clips on the “Rail Pages” and “Rail Diaries” sites – and this evening, the last old clip was replaced by its YouTube equivalent*.
The full set of videos (many of which never made it to Geoff’s Pages) can be found (in fairly random order) on the “Geoffspages Channel” on YouTube; alternatively, look for the “V” against Rail Diaries menu entries…
* I think… There could well be one or two still lurking, forgotten
The DV tapes needed a good sort out – their contents had not been recorded in a particularly logical manner, and one or two recordings had been forgotten. Here are a couple that emerged from the digital rummaging, from opposite ends of the railway spectrum…
Bank Holiday Monday! A flash of inspiration – why not use a blog for the “What’s new?” entry on the Geoff’s Pages main menu.
So here it is.
Had a great afternoon at Horsehay (Telford Steam Railway) yesterday – visiting loco 30587, the Beattie well tank, in action and in fine form. Took plenty of photos and a fair bit of video – web page to follow soon.
There should have been a new “Walks with a Camera” entry in 
the last few days – went for what might have been a very pleasant walk on Hergest Ridge, near Kington, last Saturday – but the weather was not remotely what was forecast. The continuous heavy rain (shown clearly on the BBC’s “hindcast”, but not in its forecast), which started soon after we donned boots, caused us to turn around at the top and head straight back down again. So – no page. But here’s a photo as an indicator of “what might have been”. Will probably try again “one of these days”.
Technical Notes: I installed the IE7 beta recently – and discovered that it “no longer allows the window.opener trick to bypass the window.close prompt.” The upshot of this being an annoying little message box “the webpage you are viewing is trying to close the tab” and requiring visitors to click the “Yes” button. So I’ve been through the whole site (fun with “search and replace”…) and replaced the “target=_blank” opener with a little bit of javascript – and taken the opportunity to make the picture viewing window the right size for the picture.
I’ve resized many pictures too – so that the long side is consistently 600 pixels. Mostly I was able to use the original large scans or digital images, but in the case of “bwwww” I couldn’t find them… (I think they died before being backed up when a hard disk failed a couple of years ago). So they’re resampled from the original site jpgs, which means the quality isn’t very great, which in turn means I’ve begun to rescan the negs. Endless hours of fun. And I’m sure there are still a few other problems lurking…
geoffspages.blog 