Brrrr...
Windscreen glass and couplings removed, brake pipes severed ...D1050 WESTERN RULER was nothing more than a cold hulk when photographed in the scrapyard behind Swindon Works on Saturday 31st January 1976. During its final year or two this locomotive was always recognisable ...from one side at least... by that gouge under the nameplate. The other loco was D1026 WESTERN CENTURION. I would prefer that this wasn't quite so grainy. Grain can be a thing of beauty or it can look yucky: this falls the yucky side of neutral, I feel. The flat light didn't help. It was one of the most horribly cold days I can remember. It wasn't the invigorating, frosty sort of cold you get during anticyclonic weather, but a dank, penetrating cold, sealed in by this blanket of featureless white cloud. I was numb and shivering all day, albeit that I wore my trusty ex-army greatcoat.
This is not the first public appearance of the photograph. I see from my notes that its début occurred on 4th July 2004, when I posted it to the "usenet" newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.rail ...probably as a horrible low-res scan (128KB) of the original print that had come back from Hodder's all those years ago in a two-part folding wallet of execrable design. Ten years ago! Does usenet still go on? I thought it was great for the first few months I had a computer, but became rapidly disillusioned. I forget how it went now. Didn't you have to use Outlook Express for your email and usenet newsgroups? I was too thick to understand its intricacies and preferred to get newsgroups through a website called Remarq. This suddenly disappeared but I found a replacement, which I liked less, called Dejanews. I never cared for it, abandoned usenet and transferred my activities to Yahoo! Groups. They, however, suddenly announced that they would no longer archive members' photographs. So I "migrated" to an outfit called Domeus, which offered a service similar to the old Yahoo! Groups. My account apparently still exists and I get occasional emails from them, but they were based in France or Belgium or somewhere and had a non English-speaking "euro" bias and, of course, many fewer members than Yahoo! I was just getting set up on fotopic when I discovered Flickr, which was obviously superior. In any case fotopic folded not long after. The rest is history...
Brrrr...
Windscreen glass and couplings removed, brake pipes severed ...D1050 WESTERN RULER was nothing more than a cold hulk when photographed in the scrapyard behind Swindon Works on Saturday 31st January 1976. During its final year or two this locomotive was always recognisable ...from one side at least... by that gouge under the nameplate. The other loco was D1026 WESTERN CENTURION. I would prefer that this wasn't quite so grainy. Grain can be a thing of beauty or it can look yucky: this falls the yucky side of neutral, I feel. The flat light didn't help. It was one of the most horribly cold days I can remember. It wasn't the invigorating, frosty sort of cold you get during anticyclonic weather, but a dank, penetrating cold, sealed in by this blanket of featureless white cloud. I was numb and shivering all day, albeit that I wore my trusty ex-army greatcoat.
This is not the first public appearance of the photograph. I see from my notes that its début occurred on 4th July 2004, when I posted it to the "usenet" newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.rail ...probably as a horrible low-res scan (128KB) of the original print that had come back from Hodder's all those years ago in a two-part folding wallet of execrable design. Ten years ago! Does usenet still go on? I thought it was great for the first few months I had a computer, but became rapidly disillusioned. I forget how it went now. Didn't you have to use Outlook Express for your email and usenet newsgroups? I was too thick to understand its intricacies and preferred to get newsgroups through a website called Remarq. This suddenly disappeared but I found a replacement, which I liked less, called Dejanews. I never cared for it, abandoned usenet and transferred my activities to Yahoo! Groups. They, however, suddenly announced that they would no longer archive members' photographs. So I "migrated" to an outfit called Domeus, which offered a service similar to the old Yahoo! Groups. My account apparently still exists and I get occasional emails from them, but they were based in France or Belgium or somewhere and had a non English-speaking "euro" bias and, of course, many fewer members than Yahoo! I was just getting set up on fotopic when I discovered Flickr, which was obviously superior. In any case fotopic folded not long after. The rest is history...