Posted by Jock on July 15, 2008 at 14:42:22 user Jock.
In Reply to: Polish Steam Trains posted by John Giddy on July 15, 2008 at 12:11:29:
one of our contributors may be interested to know Moi?
Having once been a TarBoard maverick, and started all sorts of
threads that made our esteemed pilot's hair turn white, I have now
reformed. All those 'marginal' posts that I meant to send out
are well and truly spiked. No more posts on disruptive subjects
such as: Did AR have a crush on Ruth Crossley? What was the colour
of the GA's bath towel, and did she bring her own or expect the
Beckfoot household to provide one? What was the valve gear of the
locomotive at Strickland junction?
I have seen the light! Good posts are about fun topics, such as
which character is my favourite, which book is my favourite, which
other children's author is my favourite. Boys' subjects such as
steam engines are 'Meccano' topics and strictly for the nerds. So
what to do when John Giddy places temptation in my path? The best
thing surely is to turn the thread back smartly to AR. So here is
my feeble attempt!
In the days when trains were real trains, the steam engines that
hauled them spent a large part of their lives being pampered in
places called engine sheds. Here is a clip of Train of Events
which was a flop of a film, but showed exactly what an 'engine shed'
was like. The film was made in 1949, but what goes on inside would
have been identical to the way that engines were prepared for the
long train journeys made by the Ss, As and Ds.
Now all real engine sheds in Europe, and in most of the rest of the
world, have been swept away. The privately preserved steam engines
that remain are looked after in places that bear only a superficial
resemblance to the engine sheds of your. All expect one that is. Thanks
to Howard Jones's footplating courses and the subsidy that his society
The Wolsztyn Experience pays out to Polish State Railways there is
still one real engine shed left, Wolsztyn in Poland.
Now it looks as if Wolsztyn's days as a 'real' shed - as opposed to a railway
museum - may be numbered.