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William Bagnall 'Courageous' heads past the exchange loops for the bitumen traffic alongside Navigation Way on the Preston Docks branch of the Ribble Steam Railway on Sunday 11th September 2016.
© Gordon Edgar - All rights reserved. Please do not use my images without my explicit permission
Over the years I enjoyed several visits to Deep Navigation colliery, it was only on rare days of sun that the difficulty of harsh sunlight became apparent. With main line photography you just move location. Chasing coal in the South Wales valleys, that luxury was not available.
37699 has been working the Nelson Bog - Taff Merthyr circuit, the loco has charge of a train of loaded MDV coal wagons.
37699 was built at English Electric as D6953, it went new to Cardiff Canton, 05/01/1965. Under TOPS it became 37253, after a heavy overhaul it was renumbered 37699 04/03/1986. The loco was cut by M.R.J Phillips at Adtranz in August 1997.
Copyright Geoff Dowling; all rights reserved
I have to wander off for a couple days to Denver and NY for some nanobusiness.
The moon reminds me of navigation... and one of my favorite stories, probably apocryphal, about the scientists who were interested in the question of why the moth spirals into the candle flame.
Part 1 THE MIND:
The neurologists mapped the entire visual pathway. Navigating by the moon, the flapping wings would occlude the light hitting the eye with each flap. Based on differential flashes driven by the cadence of the wings and angle relative to the light source, the moth would involuntarily turn toward the light to balance the input to each eye. Moths evolved without flames or light bulbs to confuse them (The moon is far away and served as a fixed beacon at night; the candle flame was bright but nearby - creating a death spiral). For some reason, they studied female moths.
Part 2 UNIVERSAL TRUTHS:
They thought they had the answer in studying the female moths. Every moth had the same pathway. Then someone looked at a male moth, and the eye-wing linkage was missing. That visual pathway was missing altogether. All moths exhibit the same behavior, so the neurologists looked for a similar pattern to explain the phenomenon.
And then it hit them. The male moths had a simpler involuntary algorithm: follow the female moth.