Friday 6 November 2009

The 2009 "Bonfire Night Special" on the Garden Railway...

Evening all! Well, its been a long day! The daytime consisted of going to college before arriving at the Garden Railway site at around 3pm. From then on I was getting everything ready for the evenings "Bonfire Night Special". Members of our family and their invited guests would be the audience for the evening and this was enough to prompt a large cleaning up of the railway. By 5pm, everything was ready! The "spotlight"-lit turntable was out and operating, as were the many locomotives which were stabled around it. The stations were illuminated, as were the sheds and the Sutherland Signalbox, as planned. At 5:30pm, the bonfire was lit in the burning tin, using a parrafin soaked rag...
Our BR Tail-lamp was also lit and was shining brightly all evening...
Trains on the railway ran all evening with Pannier Tank No5775 & Taffe Tank No6600 taking turns on the LNER Teak Rake. 5775 is seen at Sutherland with the station building internally lit. The double signals have just been fitted to the platform...
A large plant pot (brimmed with sand!) was the "Firework Box" for this year. The display consisted of many different fireworks (around 40 in all) from rockets to "spark showers". One of the smaller fireworks is seen below...Another firework illuminating the garden. Its very hard to take pictures of fireworks!...
The bonfire burnt freely all evening, aided by a good poke from an ex-broom!...
Our home-made "Steam Trains Running Today" board with the usual "10:30-17:00" covered by a small paper sign reading "Night Run, 5:30pm-8pm"...
At around 8pm the evening ended with the final train rounding the circuit behind No6600. It then took us an hour to rod through the fire, put everything away, tidy up and secure the out-buildings. (I'll be back on Sunday to ash-out the burning tin and give the garden a good hose down as the ash & sand was everywhere!). All in all it was a good evening, the 5th annual event in fact, the first one being back in 2005 when the first stage of the Garden Railway opened. (Time does fly!). Our next family & invited guests evening will be in December and it will be a new "event", the Christmas Special. The Garden Railway will hopefully be festively decorated with building illuminations, candle-lit lanterns and festive music! Fingers crossed! Its amazing how much fun you can have with a garden railway of such a small gauge! Anyway, more posts coming soon! The next post will be regarding Saturday when I am due to attend the November 'Steam Up' of my 5" gauge concern, the Ryton Pool Miniature Railway (owned & operated by CMES). Thanks for reading folks! Evening all!...

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