Rail bus at Bury

This was a German railbus last year at Bury Station. This was on the East Lancashire Preserved railway that runs up to Ramsbottom and Rawtenstall. The line is run by volunteers. This was part of a line that extended up to the Keighthly and Worth Valley railway. But a section was lost when Dr Beeching cut many of the railways in the early 1960’s when masses of steam trains were scrapped. Some of this was done when passenger use was light (eg school holidays). Lines were shortened and diesel trains were bought in (which sometimes proved unreliable). Info from my hubby.

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Old cars and engines

Today I had a break from my exhibition for an hour, so I went and sketched a few of the classic cars. I have to say there were a lot of Austin and Morris cars, plus things like the Scimitar car that I drew.

Each sketch took between 10 and 15 minutes. I tried to be accurate, but when you are standing in a field with cars or engines, people have a tendancy to walk in front of you or stand in the way.

Drawing is slow motion photography I guess you could say, you click a camera, but your hand and eyes have the effort of coordinating to get an image. It’s not easy to draw a new subject. Wheels can be too big or small. A bumper might be too high up, and cut across where the radiator grill should go. Also when you use a thin nibbed pen you have the difficulty of getting dark areas without wanting to spend ages cross hatching.

Movement is another problem, while drawing the diesel engine I tried to get a feeling if the spinning motion, but it started to get messy. There are so many pipes and wheels and tubes. I have no idea what bit does which action, its hard to link things up in your head.

Anyway I took photos of the cars for comparison, I may paint some of them.