Hi guys,
A thought came to me a few days ago, while I was undergoing guard training on a narrow guage heritage railway here in Britain. Are any of you members of heritage railways/ rail museums? And if so, do you go and volunteer regularly? I know I've always found it really enjoyable, a great thing to do on a weekend. You get to play trains with real locomotives and suchlike, and help keep some really interesting old railways going.
The railway I was was volunteering on was the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, in north west England. It's a very interesting railway, despite its small size (15" gauge!) its not a park or amusement ground railway, climbing seven miles from the coast to the foot of some of britain's highest mountains on gradients as steep as 1 in 60, at some hundreds of feet above sea level, and has been running in its present form since 1915 (originally built to carry granite extracted from a quarry in the mountains).
The only bad thing about volunteering - I was was too busy to take any photos for the good people of the Gauge!
Nevertheless, here is a link to the railways official website:
http://www.ravenglass-railway.co.uk/
and a wikipedia article, with more images and history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenglass_and_Eskdale_Railway
A thought came to me a few days ago, while I was undergoing guard training on a narrow guage heritage railway here in Britain. Are any of you members of heritage railways/ rail museums? And if so, do you go and volunteer regularly? I know I've always found it really enjoyable, a great thing to do on a weekend. You get to play trains with real locomotives and suchlike, and help keep some really interesting old railways going.
The railway I was was volunteering on was the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, in north west England. It's a very interesting railway, despite its small size (15" gauge!) its not a park or amusement ground railway, climbing seven miles from the coast to the foot of some of britain's highest mountains on gradients as steep as 1 in 60, at some hundreds of feet above sea level, and has been running in its present form since 1915 (originally built to carry granite extracted from a quarry in the mountains).
The only bad thing about volunteering - I was was too busy to take any photos for the good people of the Gauge!
Nevertheless, here is a link to the railways official website:
http://www.ravenglass-railway.co.uk/
and a wikipedia article, with more images and history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenglass_and_Eskdale_Railway