I have only ever been on the North Norfolk Railway and to a couple of museums including a trip long ago to the National Rail Museum in York so our trip to the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway was pretty exciting for me as well as the smalls.
The railway extends south-west from Keighley in the vague direction of Halifax, but stops well short (which shows a certain amount of sensible good taste). The setting is lovely Pennine countryside and pretty villages for the most part. We started out at Ingrow which is midway along the line and caught the first train of the day north to Keighley (Waggon & Maschinenbau M79964, apparently), before reboarding and heading south to Howarth (Bronte Country and the most twee, spoilt touristy village I have ever seen).
After a little bit of a walk an early lunch and a visit to the park and the swings (Small loves swings) we headed back to Ingrow.
A good part of of the afternoon passed with an excited Big and Small scampering from carriage to carriage round the line’s museum. This was very good indeed, but featured some rather creepy talking dummies. The guard was sat in the end compartment on one of the carriages and a motion sensor started it talking. Small found this in turns terrifying and fascinating.
We ended the day with a visit to Oxenhope at the southern end of the line and tea in the British Rail style buffet car which serves as a cafe and got to watch the steam train arrive and turn round to head back north.
All in all, an excellent day out.
Small nears the end of the line.
Thank you for sharing such wonderful pictures. I honestly sighed a few times because everything looked so fun. lol.
Thanks for the lovely, flattering comment.
It was great fun. If you can, go see for yourself!
I would add that as far as the pics are concerned, I will only claim credit for choosing brilliantly when I bought a Nikon Coolpix 7900, which is IMHO the ultimate in point and click – great quality results for no effort. (Photoshop 6 helps too 🙂 )
I have a strange fascination with steam trains, which amuses me LOL!
Looks like a lovely day.
Did you something to the sky in PS6 for the 2nd one, it looks slightly unreal. The only thing I would say about the 7900 is seems to suffer really bad barrell distortion, the first and second look almost fish-eye the straight lines bend so much 😉
2nd pic looks just like Howarth to me, although it could be said that the place has a certain element of otherworldliness about it anyway. Weird seeing pics on here of somewhere we go too 😀
Now you point it out Chris that is so true. Kinda gives the feel of late on a Saturday night!
I think the zoom goes out maybe a bit too wide it feels more like a 28mm equivalent than a 35mm and the distortion is no more than I would expect for that also the distortion on the first photo is elective – I noticed it when I was taking the photo but rather liked the effect. The sky in the second has been doctored, when I adjusted the contrast and brightness the real blue sky and fluffy clouds were washed out so the ones you can see are fake, but very close to the real clouds – I think it is just Howarth which looks a bit otherworldly.
The sky has changed I see….
Still fake in a way, the sky is the original with unchanged contrast and brightness, while everything else is adjusted.
Oh, if I’d known you were so near you could have called in for a cuppa. Probably not as exiting as the buffet car though. Nice pitures.