Watercolour I did several years ago at the end of Cheddleton Station platform looking towards (eventually) Froghall wharf.
In the other direction the train line extends half a mile or so before ending abruptly neat the Cheddleton to Leek main road. The train line itself used to continue to Leek before travelling on to Stoke-on-Trent.
The line is starting to be rebuilt towards Leek! It’s exciting news that has been long awaited.
To find out more look up the Churnet Valley railway on the Internet.
We bought an old radio 30 years ago, and it still works! It’s a vaccum valve radio. It only picks up long wave signals, so I can listen to radio 4 and the shipping forecast. We have a 1960’s one too with a huge battery and a large dial to tune into different stations and a big grill on the front.
It’s amazing how these relics of a bygone era can last for decades. OK if they were on all day they might break down, but I think its marvellous. Nowadays people would gut the insides and bung in some Bluetooth speakers and headphones. But I prefer a traditional mechanism. Life needs relics to remind us of our past. It’s only around 100 years since the end of the first world war. And some people born then are still alive. Go back 20 X 100 years and you are back in bible times. We think it’s ancient, but it’s not really long ago compared with deep historic time, like the millions of years ago that the dinosaurs existed.
When I was young trains were still pulled by steam engines. That’s right, I’m that old!
Our town station had a circular wooden booking hall and you walked down steps to the platforms. It was eventually demolished and a concrete station was built to replace it. If we wanted to go anywhere we had to go via Birmingham New Street. Apparently our town was almost chosen for the main station in the Midlands but Birmingham got it.
Our trips included travelling to Blackpool and to the Isle of Wight. We didn’t have a car then so any distances would have to be on a train or on a coach (coaches were better in some ways because they came back later than trains). I remember the Blackpool trip because we went up Blackpool Tower (looking a lot like the Eiffel Tower, but on top of a building). When we got to the viewing platform on the top the waves on the sea looked almost stationary. It looked weird. My mom told me she had once taken a plane ride around the tower in a tiny plane! I remember Blackpool pleasure Beach. Its the funfair on the ‘front’, including a ghost train and a big dipper roller coaster at that time I think, it has probably changed a lot now.
Then home on the steam train and a trolley bus (powered by overhead electric cables) home. I don’t remember arriving at home, I must have fallen asleep.
We visited again today to see how things are going at the Waiting room gallery. Things are happening, there are new people helping to organise the gallery spaces and it looks like they are going to have a sales /shop area and seperate exhibition space both downstairs and upstairs. The Gallery is still linked with the work going on at Longport Station to restore it. I hope that it all happens soon and without delays to their plans. I will write more as I find out what is happening.
Longport Station isn’t open to the public at the moment but it is a small station between Stoke and Manchester. It was once part of the LMS line (London Manchester and Scottish line).
Double ‘O’ gauge Station with a green LMS ginty engine, 060. Model, night time view.
It’s just on a small piece of board but it’s got two platforms and an engine shed waiting for trains to enter for repairs and maintenance. Behind the platform stand beer barrels waiting to be loaded. This would be a small country town station, perhaps in Devon, although LMS trains would usually be found all over the country and were used for shunting local freight, acting as pilot engines that ran in front of main engines to assist them on steep sections of track. They were also engines for passenger trains. With the 060 wheel set up (no leading wheels, six main wheels and no trailing wheels) they could get round twisting tracks easier.
The board is too small to have moving engines, but it’s an idea of how a station would have been set up in the past.
A couple of years ago we saw a Dalek on a station (I think it was Froghall) in the Staffordshire moorlands. Memory fades, but I know I had a short video of it perambulating backwards and forwards along the platform. I remember looking for who was running it. The original ones on TV in the sci-fi series Doctor Who, were moved by people inside the Daleks, pedalling them along.
This one was being moved by a remote control I think. I saw a man with a radio controller in his hand. Later we went to look at a model Tardis in the station itself. Tardis stands for Time and relative dimensions in space. Anyone who is a Doctor Who fan would know that.
It’s not often that you bump into an iconic 1960’s TV character in real life.
We stopped off at the village of Betws y Coed on our trip through the hills and mountains of Wales. It’s at the junction of the A470 and the A5. The village has numerous shops and is always busy with tourists. There is an environmental feel to the shops that line the front of the train station, with images of gorillas encouraging visitors to the village to support and donate to charities that are working to stop them being hunted to extinction.
After lunch in a cafe with recycled lampshades made from discarded plastic, we had a look at the station. My hubby went off to the model shop and museum over the railway bridge on the other side of the train track. My sister and I went to browse the shops.
Mallaband-Brown 