The North East Again - Not a Lot!

With a dodgy weather forecast I decided today would be a good day to go into Newcastle. The original plan had been to go through on the Metro but whilst I could have done so with the small mobility scooter, which folds, I can’t take the large one on so I had to drive. For simplicity I parked in the Eldon Square multi-storey, and found a disabled space right by the entrance to the shops which made life easy, the only problem was it wasn’t a very long space so I had to park in forwards and unload the scooter in the roadway. 

The two objectives were a revisit to the Discovery Museum and to check out the revamped Grainger Market. Once I actually got into the former (there’s building works going on and it’s not very well signposted) I spent a couple of hours just browsing round the displays starting with Turbinia - I first saw the ship back in 1982 when she was sat in a building on the Town Moor by where we were canoeing. 

This was the first turbine powered steamship, built by Charles Parsons in 1894 as an experiment. She was the fastest ship in the world at the time and was famously demonstrated, without an invite, at the 1897 Spithead Review; by 1905 the Admiralty decided all future Navy ships would be turbine powered, and in 1906 The Dreadnought became the first such warship - the turbine continues to this day driving nuclear submarines. 

It’s not often you see a signal lever frame with the safety locking on view and described on the information board.

The Grainger Market, back in the 1980’s when I shopped there, was a busy, and noisy, retail hub with everything from fresh meat and veg to tools and underwear (it’s got the oldest surviving M&S branch). Last time I visited it was mainly full of vape shops and second hand record stores with just a few of the original stalls left but recently it’s been reinvented as a street food venue, still with a couple of butchers and greengrocers and several other stalls. I ended up having Mac and Cheese Carbonara for lunch but could have chosen food from five continents if I’d wished (there were no kangaroo burgers 😀). 

I was proved right on the weather, it started raining just as I left the museum and stopped just as I drove out of the car park! It was so bad at one point I considered getting the anorak out of the scooter bag but that would have meant admitting to being a southern softy - when in Newcastle…

The North East Again - Lots of Trains

The weather forecast and some places I want to visit not being open some days has prompted a revision of which days I go where, so today I went to Hopetown in Darlington on my journey to Sunderland. 

Last time I visited Darlington it was to the North Road Station Museum but some years ago this was expanded with the addition of the adjacent goods shed and carriage works. I took time on the way to stop off at the Brick Train sculpture so arrived just as things opened. 

My first port of call was the A1 Locomotive Trust’s workshop, this is the other side of the railway but there’s a wheelchair lift to the bridge across; I was having a few problems as the door kept trying to swing closed but one of the site maintenance people came over, held the door for me, then dashed up the stairs and made sure I was ok getting out! I got cannier going down and reversed in but the spring was still making it difficult to fully open the door to exit. Although Tornado wasn’t in residence their second new loco build, P2 - Prince of Wales is underway. This class would have been Britain’s most powerful passenger steam locos but unresolved problems meant they were rebuilt as Pacifics, the hope is that with modern engineering they can fix the issues. 

From there I visited the carriage works, an exhibition space, which was closed, and the museum’s artefacts store which you can browse around. I did spot this platform sign which must be from Monkwearmouth Station, I suspect dating from around 1925 when Brockley Whins was renamed Boldon Colliery, hence the painted out name. It reverted to the old name in 1991 before being incorporated into the Metro system in 2002. 

The main museum building is a bit tight to get around as the main hall is literally two of the platforms with infilling between the stock. It’s changed a little since my last visit, but not all that much! I was constantly dodging little kids as I think mum’s had taken the chance to visit now the older ones are back at school but I managed to avoid running any of them over. 

Once I’d had a good look round and had a coffee and teacake and another wander I headed off to Sunderland and the Seaburn Inn. There are two signs you’re nearly there when approaching from the South, the first sight of Penshaw Monument and Houghton Cut - the latter, now on the A690, was first dug in around 1815 to provide a road between Sunderland and Houghton Le Spring and has been progressively deepened and widened ever since. 

The North East Again - More Trains

I’m thinking of starting a campaign, PAH! - Pacers Aren’t Heritage! Today was the second one I’ve travelled on this trip, this time on the Weardale Railway. I do understand their reasons for using them, and in this case their heritage DMU is only a single unit so with it being a bank holiday they’ll have wanted the longer two car train, but they’re not great and I believe they could well reduce passenger numbers. 

Most people visit heritage railways for nostalgia, even the older diesels can evoke memories but I’m afraid Pacers were hated from when they were launched. There’s only one reason I’d visit the Weardale again, the delightful old fashioned tea room! It’s nothing fancy but the service is excellent and my lunch, a slice of Weardale Potato Cake, which is actually a bacon and potato pie, was delicious; the coffee came with a proper ginger nut biscuit as well, not one of those fancy Biscoff ones. 😀 As a bonus, the family who were in had come well prepared with felt pens and colouring in books for the kids who were having fun quietly. 

After lunch I indulged in a bit of nostalgia, crossing the watershed between Weardale and Teesdale to Middleton. I stopped for a while to visit the community bookshop, I didn’t buy anything this time but I’ve picked up a railway book or two there in the past. I also had a look round the Kirkcarrion Gallery, a relatively new artists’ collective, as I’m in the process of changing out some of the pictures at home. 

The gallery is in what used to be Bob Raine’s TV shop, back in the 60’s he had three holiday caravans in the back courtyard, one of which we hired twice for a couple of my earliest holidays. I didn’t buy anything in the end, there were a couple of pictures I could have lived with but they didn’t really grab my attention. 

From Middleton I wandered back to the hotel, I might have called in at Barnard Castle but my back had had enough walking for the day (all of a couple of hundred yards) and it wouldn’t have been worth offloading the scooter. 

Looking at the weather forecast for later in the week I might move plans around a bit - rain all day on Wednesday isn’t ideal for a prolonged trundle round Sunderland but would be OK if I go to Newcastle as that will mainly be indoors. 

A quick note on photos in the blog, I don’t edit these in any way, they’re straight off the camera, better versions may appear elsewhere later. 

As a further aside it’s taken three days for my accent to change back to confused North East (a combination of being born in Sunderland and spending three years at Newcastle Uni!) 

The North East Again - It’s a Small World

Today was definitely a bucket list tick off, a visit to Ryhope Engines Museum, near Sunderland, on a steaming day - my previous visits up here have never been at the right time. Getting the scooter round even the lower levels was tricky, they do have a platform lift but the access to that is tight, and I still had to park up for the stairs to the upper levels - it was well worth it though! 

The station was built in the 1860’s to provide water for domestic and industrial use in the nearby pit villages and in Sunderland. There are two beam engines, with 4 pumps (water is pumped up around 250ft in two stages to keep the system balanced and there are two separate wells), steam is provided by 3 Lancashire type boilers, although only one is normally fired as they’re not actually pumping water so don’t need as much pressure. The engines are two cylinder compound condensing which means they’re very economical to run. 

Not quite what we normally think of as starting handles! They set the various valves manually for starting the engine.

A combination of a lowering water table, which increased the risk of brackish water from the sea entering the system, the hardness of the water and reservoirs such as Derwent and Kielder being built led to the closure in the 1960’s after just on a century of work. 

The small world part of the title comes from a conversation I had with one of the blacksmiths working on site, both he and his father worked at Doxfords Shipyard in Sunderland, as did my Dad and Grandpa. Even more coincidentally his Dad and my Dad both served their time in the engine works and as they’re now 91 and 90 respectively must have been there at the same time. We’re both going to ask our respective parents if they recall the other although after 70 years or so that’s unlikely. 

I ended the visit with a mug of coffee and a slab (and I mean a slab, not a slice) of homemade fruit loaf with butter, for the princely sum of £3! 

The second port of call (pun intended) was Seaham Harbour to visit the East Durham Heritage Centre and photograph a couple of sculptures. Oddly the car park above the harbour, by the Tommy sculpture, has a mixture of free and chargeable spaces, and I was fortunate to get one of the free ones. 

The less well known Coxswain sculpture, also by Ray Lonsdale.

The Heritage Centre’s main attraction is the George Elmy lifeboat, which has a fairly tragic story attached. We hear  quite a lot about the Penlee Lifeboat Disaster of 1981 when 16 people lost their lives after the Solomon Browne tried to rescue the crew of the Union Star but the Seaham Disaster of 1962 is less well known. Five lifeboatmen and four crew of the Coble Economy were drowned with just one of the Coble’s crew surviving after the lifeboat was overwhelmed by a freak wave within yards of reaching safety. 

The restored George Elmy.

The lifeboat itself was washed up, retrieved and after extensive repairs used as a relief boat elsewhere for a number of years before being sold off and converted to a fishing boat. By chance a Seaham local noticed her advertised for sale and the Heritage Group were able to purchase and restore her. Seaham lifeboat station closed in 1979 as larger and faster boats came into service and could better cover the area from elsewhere.

As the hotel I’m stopping at don’t do Sunday evening meals I’d booked a table at a gastro pub the other side of the town (which is basically shut in a Sunday evening!) Sadly it turned out to be very underwhelming as neither the Black Pudding and Chorizo Scotch Egg or the Classic Parmo (breaded chicken in cheese sauce) had a lot of flavour, which takes some skill with those ingredients! Throw in the fact the place was noisy and I was quite happy the service was quick and I could get back to the hotel. 

The North East Again - Wow!

In fact, wow, wow and thrice wow! 

Today was my long awaited visit to Kynren, a fantastic history show, and largely run by volunteers - it stretches further though as it’s an Arts, Education and Conservation charity allied to Auckland Project. I could go on for a long time about this but please look it up if interested. 

The evening show has been running since 2016 but this year the first four daytime shows have opened, Land of the Vikings, The Lost Feather, The Trusty Steed and Legend of the Wear. I won’t go into too many details, and I’ve respected the request to not photograph the shows, as it could spoil things for anyone else who visits. 

The choreography in the Viking show was excellent and the fight scenes were probably a lot more accurate than often portrayed, short, sharp and brutal, with grappling, not the long drawn out fancy swordplay you usually see. Throw in some acrobatics, music, flames and a good story line and it was superb. 

The Feather show is birds, lots and lots of birds, and they’re up close - having a huge great vulture fly a few feet over your head is magnificent, and just a little scary. This is where part of their conservation work comes in, with breeding programmes for rare species. 

The Trusty Steed is, obviously, about horses. This show is set in the Medieval and includes jousting, all with another good backstory. Of course the good peasant triumphs over the evil baron in the end! 

There’s only really one legend associated with the River Wear that they could tell, although this was a different version it still involved river monsters, a witch and a hero called John! Some of the acrobatics in high places looked a bit iffy to me but a strategically hidden crash mat took care of the deliberate falls and at one point our hero paused to clip on his fall arrest before climbing a lighthouse. 

After a break and some OK food I parked up the scooter in the designated area and found my seat. Unfortunately, whilst the forecast rain had held off most of the day there had been a shower and the seats were somewhat wet. ☹️ Never mind, there’s a heated towel rail in my hotel bathroom so I can dry my shorts out. The evening show is a multimedia spectacular history of England, and particularly of the North East (although they missed out shipbuilding) from Roman times to the end of the Second World War. There were some very dodgy fire arrows from Harold Godwinson’s archers but there was very little to complain about. 😊

I managed a reasonably quick getaway, partly ‘cause I chose a seat right by an exit, and I’ve just about got the knack of stowing the scooter so I’m now sat sitting with a pint in the hotel bar. 

Overall an excellent day - It’s not cheap and there’s quite a bit of time spent hanging around between performances but that’s OK.

And just in case you thought you’d escaped trains…

Locomotion at Kynren Station, which is based on Stanhope where I’ll be on Monday.

The North East Again - Getting There

My last holiday of the year is back to North East England, firstly just outside Bishop Auckland then on to my birthplace of Seaburn. Due to family commitments I’d planned to visit late September but as the bank holiday is as late as it can be I decided to come up earlier which is allowing me to tick off some bucket list items (more on these over the next few days). 

On the way up I revisited the Wensleydale Railway, catching the first train meant an early start from home but I was awake anyway. It’s several years since I last rode the line, my last visit was to a model railway show while I was camping nearby and it was too busy to bother with a journey. Unfortunately they’ve now abandoned steam altogether due to finances which is a shame, I had hoped we’d at least get the Heritage DMU (a designation that encompasses the 1st generation diesel mechanical railcars) but instead it was the Pacer. ☹️ These units were built as a stopgap using bus body and interior parts on a railway chassis, as they were all withdrawn a few years ago I guess they are “heritage” in their own way but they are one of the worst vehicles ever to grace Britain’s railways and are definitely not ideal for back pain sufferers. This one came from the West Wales network - I know ‘cause they haven’t changed the prerecorded announcements. 😀

The Wensleydale Railway has long been one of my favourites, partly because they’re always so friendly. Having arrived a bit early I was given a personal tour of the Station Master’s House, which is attached to the business part of Leeming Bar station, nothing much I haven’t seen before but interesting that it was definitely high status, it even had an attached washroom complete with copper (but still an outside toilet!) Whilst sitting at Leyburn one of the railway staff wandered through offering his services to take pictures of people sitting on the train - no interest to me but a few people handed him their phones.  

More trains followed as I stopped off at Locomotion in Shildon on my way to the hotel. Again I’ve been before but the Flying Scotsman was on show and they were doing rides behind the replica Rocket, although I didn’t bother with either it presented photo opportunities. After a coffee and ginger cake, ostensibly made to Mrs Stevenson’s own recipe, it was time to head to the hotel and check in. The rooms are around a courtyard, shades of the recent trip to Warners, but are well appointed. 

I didn’t take a lot of photos as they’re places I’ve been before but here’s a few:

The Flying Scotsman

The Pacer, the most uncomfortable train to run in Britain…

…since these went out of fashion in the 1800s!

Gunton Hall

The trip was the annual celebration for the TOGs of Sir Terry Wogan’s birthday, TBW, which is really an excuse to get together and enjoy ourselves; for the last few years these have been at various Warner’s hotels around the country. Gunton Hall is near Lowestoft and not all that far from home so a stop on the way seemed a good idea. Although I’ve been to all these events it was the first time for friends Steve and Mandy. 

Sunday - Trains

As it’s quite a few years since I was last at Bressingham Steam and Gardens I was interested to see if much had changed - it hadn’t! There were advantages being there on a summer weekend though with various visiting groups including the local model engineering society and the British Organ Grinders Association putting on displays. 

Organ Grinders at work!

We had a couple of train rides, the narrow gauge lines were diesel hauled due to the recent very hot weather combined with the rising cost of coal, we also wandered round the exhibitions and the engine sheds and had a delicious sausage sandwich for lunch, the sausages were from the estate’s own Gloucester Old Spot and Large Black pigs. 

Small, but sufficient for the train

I have a soft spot for Beyer Garratts

I would like to note the kindness of strangers, after Steve and Mandy had chained up her scooter ready for a ride on the Garden Railway they were sat on the bench by the entrance when the queue suddenly grew. A kind gentleman offered to let them in at the appropriate time, and I joined having locked my scooter up. In the end the half dozen or so people at the front of the queue all kindly held back while we hobbled our way to the first coach (standing for long periods is difficult so queuing can be a problem). 

From Bressingham it was an easy run to the hotel arriving at a good time to get checked in and head to the bar. The only minor irritation was that all the disabled parking was full which meant a longer walk than ideal but I did manage to move the car later. The after dinner entertainment wasn’t too bad, a band and the ents staff who were all competent and doing decent music. 

Monday - Boats

After breakfast I retrieved the new mobility scooter out of the car and trundled the couple of miles down to Lowestoft itself. My aim was to visit the Royal Naval Patrol Service and Maritime museums which are very close to each other. 

The maritime museum is mainly about fishing, in particular herring, at its peak 770 boats were based in the harbour but the last deep water fishing ended in 2002; it’s an interesting museum with plenty of models and other displays. 

Looking out past the Maritime Museum

The Patrol Service museum is located at their former headquarters, HMS Europa, in Sparrow’s Nest Gardens. The Service started mainly with requisitioned trawlers, often with their original skipper and crew who were enlisted into the Naval Reserve. Their main role was in minesweeping, as hauling the cables for that role is similar to the work needed for trawling, although there were also some armed trawlers used against U-Boats which didn’t waste torpedoes on smaller vessels but surfaced and could be taken with gunfire. 

The former HMS Europa, aka Sparrow's Nest

Overall two very interesting museums and well worth the visit. I was interested to see how the scooter ran on a longer trip, as you’d expect it was fine although one hill on the path in the park got a bit too steep and I had to walk. Checking the battery consumption I should have around 19-20 miles on a full charge which was what I expected. 

The rest of the day was spent drinking, talking and eating which is about the norm. 

Tuesday- Not Planes!

There are no planes at the East Anglia Transport Museum so we can't complete the song but there are trams, trolley buses and a railway.

Trams and a Trolley Bus

We’d arranged to meet up with one of Mandy’s friends and her family but having had a coffee at the hotel we just timed it wrong for parking; fortunately I got the last disabled space and Steve parked on the end of a row then by the time the friends arrived someone was just leaving. We caused a fair bit of chaos as we had two mobility scooters, two electric wheelchairs and three other people - even though we were all able to walk short distances the logistics of getting on and off trams and trains and queuing for the disabled loo all took time. It was a really good day out though and we then later found we’d won the weekend’s quiz as well.