I don't know whether anyone os interested, however here's a write up about my trip behind Tangmere last Thursday.
First of all, I had to get up at 5, and get ready for the 7:11 train from Ryde St Johns to the ferry. (obviously the train arrived bang on time). All going well we arrive at Portsmouth Harbour 10mins early. Walk up the platform, and....Yay! In rolls a brand new 444, which we get on straight away. (the air con is perfect). Thus ensues a smooth 'glide' to Woking, where to change onto a Mk1 train (what a comedown) Get off at Clapham on time, walk over and get on another Southern Mk1 train for the ride into Victoria, where we annoyingly pull into the most furthest platform away possible. We have to trudge all the way from platform 16 (or whatever the furthest away is), all the way to platform 2, where we see a 67 drag in the Wessex train with Tangmere at the head. (What a relief, the previous one we went on had no steam engine). Here chaos takes over, the coachs are in the wrong order, and lack proper seat numbers, thankfully we find our coach is right behind the support coach, and we sit down wherever we like. Another dissapointment is that we get banked by the 67, and tangmere dosen't help at all. Therafter a high-speed run to Yeovil ensues with a few stops along the way. We arrive at Yeovil roughly on time, and we have 4 hours to burn, so we have a look around.
Eventually its time to go, by this point we are absolutely burning, it was so hot. We are right at the back of the train, however as we fly through the night (after an excellent restart from Salisbury), we still see lots of astonished look from people walking, and even people waving from their bedrooms (on the way to Yeovil, just after leaving Victoria, ther were vries of laughter as a man leaps out of his bathroom onto his balcony with a towel around him waving a pair of union jack boxers!
)We get off at Clapham, only to find that our train back to portsmouth had dissapeared', it was not in their timetable. So we got a 455 and another slammer (having had a strane and eery event on the way down past Guildford - the train stopped hard, after a few minutes the driver blew his horn, and we proceeded past a red signal. We got up to about 40, although we slowed through level crossings), so I guess it was a failed signal. We missed the last Island Line train (having got the 00:40 (!) ferry), so we had to walk a mile and a half back to our car, by which time we were so tired we must've looked drunk
Eventually we got back to our house at 1:30, a 19 and a half hour day!Here are a few photos, If anyone has ones of the train en-route, I would very much like to see them.
Click the image to zoom in
Click the image to zoom in
Click the image to zoom in
Click the image to zoom in
Cheers,
Chris
