Reaching out to the Past

It's official - I am obsessed! This morning I bought a 1980 Model Railway Constructor magazine that I have wanted for ages. This is not something I have bought just to please Robbie, I haven't even told him about it because he would probably tell me to buy a magazine about Deltics instead!

I have been researching my family tree for a number of years and as many of my ancestors lived in and around Northampton I have become fascinated by old photos and old maps of the town. If only we could have street view on old maps, there so many places that I would like to see as they were when my grandparents and great grandparents knew the town. I would like to see where they lived, where they worked and the places that mattered in their lives. Most of all I would like to see the three railway stations in the town as they were then.

We think the world has progressed but in terms of public transport my grandmother's horizons were much wider than my own. She could travel to many towns and villages within the county by train and if she wanted to travel further, the train would take her; and for more local journeys she could rely on the tram. 

The first of our railway stations to close was the most convenient and most beautiful of the three. It was less than a five minute walk from St John's station to the market square. Clearly customer convenience was not a high priority even then - some things never change! Saint John's Station had opened in 1872, it was the northern terminus of the Midland Railway's Bedford to Northampton line. The station was built above street level on red brick arches which carried the line across the road and out of the town on the 21 mile journey to Bedford via Piddington (which in reality was much closer to Horton), Olney and Turvey. It was closed in July 1939 as a cost cutting measure and the services were re-routed to the much less convenient Castle Station.

Now it would take Sherlock Holmes to find any clue that a station ever stood on that spot, the station seems to have been erased from local memory and there are so few photos that you could almost suspect a cover up. So my reason for buying the old magazine was that it contains plans of St Johns and with the help of maps and old photos I can perhaps imagine the station in it's glory days.

A Little Ray of Sunshine!

I always look forward to weekends but they seldom live up to expectation, this weekend was a bit fraught because I had loads of work and a tight deadline, but I managed to get it all done. Robbie was an absolute pain for most of the weekend, he was ready to fall out with his own shadow, it felt as if he was wandering around under his own personal rain cloud. The cause of all this doom and despondency – he had left a bag with 4 new and unread railway magazines on the train!

He Has Been Warned!

Robbie can be so irritating sometimes, but somehow he always manages to make it my fault! It was past midnight when I went to bed, I left Robbie downstairs, but by the time I came out of the bathroom he had installed himself on the bed and was sitting there like an overgrown garden gnome reading one of his railway magazines. I tried to get into my side of the bed but the weight of 'the gnome' made it impossible to move the covers, it was more like a straight jacket than a duvet. After a battle he grudgingly moved for a second so that I could get into bed properly. I asked him to turn off the lights, but he refused, he needed the main light on as well as the 'search light' on his side of the bed, just to read about trains in the middle of the night.

All I wanted was to listen to Radio 4's book of the week, Chocolate and Cuckoo clocks: The Essential Allen Coren while I settled down to sleep. It is only on for 15 minutes and I can set the radio to turn off after an hour so it doesn't matter if I doze of f. Robbie would normally have listened to it too, but last night he turned the radio off without even asking me, I put it back on and he declared war. First he decided to read out loud and the more I asked him to shut up the louder he got, that didn't get sufficient reaction so he decided to eat Minstrels in bed, I can't bear the crunching, it's disgusting. I threatened to kill him but he still wouldn't stop so I lay there thinking about going to sleep downstairs, I started to get out of bed and he begged me to stay, promising to turn the light off. I stayed and he put, and he turned the light off and got into bed, but that was when the trouble really started. He deliberately lifted and fanned the duvet to let all the cold air in and as far as I am concerned that is unforgivable, then as I was finally dozing he kept prodding me and being annoying. Then suddenly he was asleep and once again I was left wide awake having to listen to him sleeping.

This morning he claimed that I was really miserable with him last night and he hadn't done anything to deserve it. Well, I am giving him fair warning, I am now armed with a black permanent marker and if he lets the heat out of my bed again he will wake up to find that his features have been enhanced with a moustache and whatever else I feel inspired to do at the time. I don't care if the RMT have messed up his timetables, it is no excuse for disrupting my sleep!