We've all been out today for a trip on Thomas the Tank Engine. It proved to be a very enjoyable but somewhat soggy affair as the weather has definitely taken on monsoon proportions. I shall be most upset if they start issuing hosepipe bans in the next couple of months after all the rain that has fallen on the West Country in the last week.
This is a picture of Thomas as he was changing direction in order to pull all the carriages back to the station.
The Thomas trips are held by a local private railway which is all run by volunteers. They have about four or five miles of track which they have relaid themselves, and they restore and run the old steam engines on this bit of line most weekends of the year. The visit of Thomas the Tank Engine is an eagerly awaited twice-yearly event.
Scarily, I am just about old enough to remember going on steam trains for real on this track when it ran all the way into Bath. With breath-taking short sightedness this line, and many many others across the UK, were axed by Dr Beeching in the 1960's. If only the government of the day could have seen what damage the internal combustion engine would cause to the planet a mere forty years later, perhaps they would have thought twice about getting rid of so many wonderful (and well used) little branch lines.
The biblical proportions of the rain didn't deter the crowds (we are British after all, so well used to getting soaked on days out), and DN was very well equipped by wearing his Thomas the Tank Engine wellingtons.
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