“When a man is tired of London….”

 

Not yet, anyway! Primarily this time for Neil Young at Hyde Park, and after escaping from the heat outside with JMW Turner at Tate Britain the next day, we ended up at the redeveloped landscape behind Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. I never got to 34A Kings Cross sheds, nor the portals of Copenhagen tunnel and its surrounding streets where the Ealing Comedy, The Ladykillers, was filmed. It’s also taken us some time to get there after renewal, though I’d been told it was well worth a visit.

The land north of and between the approaches to Kings Cross and St Pancras had been railway land since the mid-nineteenth century. The goods yards and sidings of the Great Northern Railway included warehouses, gasometers and coal drops, where goods trains arrived from the Yorkshire collieries on the upper levels and dumped their coal onto the carts [and later the lorries] below. Coal also went to make coal gas, which was stored in grey, cylindrical gasometers, once a common feature of most towns and cities. Coal was also distributed along the Regents Canal, connected to the Grand Union Canal at Little Venice, beyond Paddington station.  

In a major renewal programme begun at the start of the present century, the old has been impressively incorporated into the new in a series of imaginative designs. The canal provides a leisure walkway and barge rides, the gasometer frames are now wrapped around modern apartments, high-tech’ office blocks provide employment, and the coal drops, themselves, have been preserved and adapted to attract top-end retailers, bars and restaurants. The tree-lined square that sits between the canal bridge and these redevelopments has plentiful seating, an outsize TV screen [showing an embarrassingly one-way Wimbledon ladies final on the afternoon that we were there], paved areas with fountains to the delight of the children getting thoroughly soaked on a hot summer’s day, outdoor art displays – currently a summer seaside photographic exhibition, and all surrounded by lively bars and cafes. I found the whole scene most uplifting. What a triumph it is, showing just what can be done where there is a determination to retain important elements of our built history and at the same time bringing new opportunities to formerly run-down inner urban areas and successfully breathing new life into forgotten corners of our old cities. 

   

Colwick

 In April 1969, we called in at Colwick on our way home from overnights at youth hostels in Lincoln and Grantham. If my memory serves me, there was nothing on the sheds except one diesel shunter. The former sprawling yards that had been a hive of activity in the days of steam just a few years beforehand were silent and deserted. Many of the former sidings were then replaced with a retail park and the old shed site is now a Lidl. A couple of years ago, however, Boden Rail Engineering developed a facility adjacent to the Netherfield lagoons wildlife reserve, at the end of a spur connecting the new sheds to the Nottingham to Grantham line just before the Trent crossing. Railway maintenance had returned to Colwick. As with Leeds Midland Road depot, as a visitor one is hardly made to feel welcome. The same warning signs, gates and robust high fencing surround the site, which is also physically closed off at its single track access point on the spur. Boden Rail looks after Colas locomotives from classes 37, 56 and 70. Two superfluous Class 60s, Nos. 60057 and 60075, are also parked up there. Nos. 37099 and 56087 were also visible on recent visits. 

Leeds Midland Road Freightliner depot

They really don’t want you at the sheds these days. The resolutely high and sturdy fencing, the closed and locked gates, the no parking zones, the CCTV cameras, the warning notices and the double-yellows on the road round about the entrance, all serve to make you feel like an intruder, as your eyes search for convenient gaps in the fence big enough to take a picture through. It’s a world away from a leisurely visit to the sheds as it was in the sixties, when part of the fun was to get round without getting caught, ticked off or thrown out - a necessary game to be played in the quest for numbers. It’s a non-starter these days. These places are secure fortresses today sealed off from the world outside, as those inside protect their assets from graffiti artists, vandals and thieves. It’s sad that its necessary, of course, but I get where they’re coming from. The world has changed but we have lost something along the way. The innocent spotter and photographer has become a figure of suspicion. It makes you feel almost guilty to be there, at all, snooping around on the periphery at the weekend, where it appears from the outside that 7-day working is largely also a thing of the past. At least you could park the car near the entrance to Leeds Freightliner depot. There was no sign of life through the bars, but the stored Class 70s that had prompted my visit were there and a line of them could just about be viewed from the other side of the bridge after a short walk through the rain on an overgrown footpath strewn with rubbish as far as a brief gap in the foliage. Even with binoculars I couldn’t make out the numbers I was separated from by two sets of railings. I’m assuming that one of those in the middle distance was No. 70013, which according to other peoples’ online records has been parked up there for years, even though its place in the line has changed from time to time. Confirmation from elsewhere that I actually saw 70013 yesterday would help me rescue an otherwise rather depressing sojourn.

  

Leicester Diesels 6 June 25

Rather quiet outside UKRL at Leicester this morning. Class 69 No. 69010 lurking round the back and 57 No. 57303 leaving the depot light engine going south.

Birthday, to you

We headed for the National Trust’s estate at Longshaw and walked to the top of Padley Gorge, well-known for its ancient oak-wooded valley that hosts some interesting summer visitors. We heard wood warbler [with the help of the Merlin App] and common redstart had also been spotted. Patience was eventually rewarded with excellent views of a pair of pied flycatchers. Wandering down the road to Hathersage after lunch, an attractive little place overlooked by the millstone grit outcrop of Stanage Edge, we spent half an hour on the station. The Edale route between Manchester and Sheffield was busy, with Class 66-hauled stone traffic to and from the quarries at Tunstead, near Buxton, finding paths between the longer distance TransPennine units and the Class 195 local passenger services that link the two cities. After that, it was a dip in the modestly heated but very refreshing and well-run lido at Hathersage, bathed also in low sunlight. The Peak District looks fabulous when the sun is out. It was a great way to celebrate a birthday.

   

Market Drayton

There is a fundamental attraction in visiting a town I’ve not been to before, even, as on this occasion, when the station has long been closed and been replaced by a supermarket. The Wellington to Drayton Railway opened as part of the GWR in 1867 and closed to passengers in 1963 and freight in 1967. I had listened to trains on it in the 1950s, whilst enjoying a farm holiday with the family at Cold Hatton, but even though I marched my mum under a hot summer sun to Ellerdine Halt, I never saw anything pass by. I put it down as an early exercise in learning to deal with frustration.

The Shropshire Union Canal got there before the railway and there are some half-timbered Tudor style buildings, but Market Drayton seemed a little sleepy yesterday, kind of half-hearted and resigned to a lesser role than previously. The centre has its share of a tattoo shops, bookmakers, vaping outlets and empty units, in common with so many market towns around the country today. We found a warm welcome at Ford Hall Farm’s café, but others we sampled in the town seemed underused, uninspired, and when the lights went out and one half of the double-door was locked on the dot of 4’o clock, we knew that afternoon teatime was emphatically over, and that kind of summed it up, really. 

       

Nuneaton 28 March 2025

Varied traffic on a bright and breezy day. Classes 37, 56, 57, 66, 68, 70, 88, 90 all represented. Time they got round to fixing the men’s toilets on platform two, though, and the canopy between 4 and 5, as well, where jacks are in place to hold up the roof and it’s therefore still partly cordoned off.