Good grief, I am more than a month behind, and there are so many photos to get through! Moreover, we are off to Italy soon, so I need to get up to date quickly.
My grandson being so besotted with Thomas the Tank Engine, we thought we'd take him to see the Bluebell Railway, where there are lots of restored steam trains to look at and you can ride in one too. The Bluebell Railway is a heritage railway, running along 11 miles of track between Sheffield Park and East Grinstead, and was apparently the first preserved standard gauge steam-operated passenger railway in the world to operate a public service.
It operates on what used to be part of the Lewes and East Grinstead Railway, which was opened in the 1870s and closed in 1958, after many challenges by local residents and even arguments in Parliament. Shortly after this, a society, which later was called the Bluebell Railway Preservation Society, was formed to preserve the line. It opened as a tourist attraction in 1960, running first a short distance from Sheffield Park to Bluebell Halt, just short of Horstead Keynes station. The railway is staffed mainly by volunteers, and has subsequently been extended several times; the last section, right into the town of East Grinstead, was opened in March this year.
We drove to Sheffield Park Station, which is in Sussex, not too far away from us. The station was built in 1882, mostly to serve Lord Sheffield who sponsored it and owned the large house and estate about a mile away. He was apparently a great supporter of Cricket and, according to information on the web site, the “Sheffield Shield” is still played for today in Australia. This station has been restored in the style of the Brighton era in the 1880s.
This is the photo from the Bluebell Railway web site, better than anything I have taken, but rather a small size compared with my other photos; my re-sizing efforts seem to have failed with my existing software.
We went off to look first at all the locomotives in the engine shed. My grandson was struck completely dumb by the size of them - I don't think he had any idea of the size previously.
This is the small boy completely amazed by Captain Baxter, which is actually a very small engine. It was built in 1887, and spent most of its working life at the Dorking Greystone Lime works.
My grandson was even more amazed by the bigger engines.
I think this one is still operational, though static today. It was built in 1905, and withdrawn from service when the line closed.
There is also an interesting small Museum on Platform 2 but my grandson at 29 months old was too young to appreciate it, so we weren't able to go there - he'll enjoy it when he's a bit older.
This is Platform 2, just outside the Museum, with lovely old trunks and suitcases piled up ready for a porter to put them on the train. I am afraid I can remember travelling in the late 1940s and early 1950s with a trunk not unlike the one on top of the pile on the right. And I'm quite old enough to remember railway porters!
While we were on Platform 2, the train came in.
That's the locomotive Bluebell at the front of the train. It is quite a small locomotive, and the train was a long one so Bluebell was not sufficiently powerful to pull all the carriages; there's a bigger locomotive just behind.
We rushed across the pedestrian bridge to get a better look.
Bluebell (who looks quite similar to Thomas the Tank Engine) was built in 1910 and is the flagship of the 'fleet' of locomotives.
There was quite a long pause while both engines were uncoupled, moved to the other platform to take on water, then moved to the other end of the train ready to set off back to East Grinstead. When they returned to Platform 1, small boys were allowed into the cab of the larger locomotive, no. 592, to look at the controls. My grandson found it hard to understand what he was seeing, and was amazed by the firebox. He didn't want to get off, and insisted on getting into one of the carriages for a ride. His mother hastily bought a ticket to East Grinstead for both of them, and we drove there to pick them up. We nearly didn't make it, because I didn't have my car keys and Paul had given his to our daughter-in-law to put into her bag as they are so heavy. We realised this just as we got back to the car, and Paul ran like a hare back to the station and persuaded them to delay the train's departure for a few second while he ran up and down the train looking for our daughter-in-law and his keys!
After that, the only problem was to persuade our grandson to get off the train once it had reached East Grinstead - he really wanted to stay on it. He was very tired though, so he was glad to eat his lunch and go home for a nap.
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