sally_maria | A fun few days (Reply)

First, thank you very much to everybody for the birthday wishes. I had a lovely day, with steam trains and cake. :-)

It was just the culmination of a fun weekend, though.

It was time for the Games Expo again and gayalondiel and I were going to stay with the_marquis and na_lon for the weekend, along with ExMemSec. Friday evening was more stressful than it ought to have been, as car trouble meant we didn't get to Wolves until well after 10pm. But our hosts were truly welcoming, and we still got to bed at a fairly reasonable hour.

I didn't have my camera this year - but here are some pictures of Games Expo that I took last year. It's a great place to see games you don't see anywhere else, with random Doctor Whos and Star Wars characters wandering about. :-) We talked to people about Tolkien, played 3 different versions of Fluxx and even sold the odd TST item. :-) Oh, and Darth Vader ordered

the_marquis executed, but fortunately real-life Clone Warriors are just as bad shots as in the films. :-)

We went back to Wolves for dinner yesterday, before setting out for home and I was surprised by a lovely birthday cake. :-) Thorntons fudge FTW! It was lovely to spend the weekend with a great group of people, and we're already making plans for next year.

It's been a while since I've had a chance to go to any of the steam railways apart from the local one, and while I'm never going to stop supporting it, it's nice to have a chance to see other railways as well. The Severn Valley Railway is not that far away, and it's celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, so it seemed a good excuse to pay them a visit.

It was a quiet day for them, with only a few trains running, but we still had plenty of time to see everything and it was quite nice not to be crowded on the trains.

We started at Kidderminster, with only a few minutes to spare before our train, so we decided to look around the station at the end of our visit. We headed off north towards Highley, half way along the line, where the railway museum and visitors' centre (The Engine House) is. It has a nice cafe, with views of the line and the surrounding countryside.

That's the Severn in the middle.

The main display at the Engine House consists of a hall with many of the engines that are no longer in service on the line.

A GWR Hall class - Hagley Hall

After admiring the engines (and Dad taking some of the numbers ;-D) we went back to Highley station to continue our journey to Bridgnorth.

Highley station

In the mid-19th Century, after one too many head-on collisions, the railway companies decided that the best way of ensuring that there was only one train in any given single-track section, was for the signaller to hand over a token to the driver, to be given back once the train had left that section. Modern trains use electronics - but on the Severn Valley it's still the job of some poor mug to stand there, and let the token be taken from his hand.

On to Bridgnorth, which has a fascinating old station, including a pub called the Railwayman's Arms on the platform.

We had enough time for me to take some pictures of the engine...

before the return trip.

On the way back we mananged to be looking the right way to see into the West Midlands Safari Park - there's something particularly surreal about looking at elephants and rhinos while riding in a steam train.

Back at Kidderminster, we had the time to look around and admire the beginning of their set-up for their 1940s weekends.