Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday. That was because last night was spent at the online Community Rail Awards – which was a brilliant event! Yes, it was sad not to be able to see people in the flesh, but the platform used by Community Rail Network to deliver the event had a lot of features that allowed interactions beyond just watching the ceremony so it was the nearest best thing. If you missed it and want to see the fantastic work done by community rail volunteers you can find the awards here on YouTube. Enjoy!

Now the awards are over today’s been spent playing catch-up on the slide scanning front. Only now I’ve started scanning my old world railway slides in tandem with the travel stuff that I’ve been doing these past few weeks. Today I’ve added another 60 old slides that I took in India in 1991 when steam locomotives were in everyday service. Many of the pictures have never seen the light of day before as I never got around to scanning them in the past. It’s been a real trip down memory lane for me as – despite the fact they’re almost 30 years old – as soon as I saw them it seemed like yesterday, but my – how the world’s changed since then! So here’s the picture of the day, which I took just a few days after my 32nd birthday, in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India…

A metre-gauge Class YP 4-6-2 ‘Pacific’ No 2000 comes off a train and passes one of the many semaphore signal gantries that guarded the station at the time. This scene’s changed out of all recognition in the 21st century, so I consider myself fortunate to have seen it like this. I remember UK railways in the age of steam, but I was too young to get out and about to appreciate those days. Experiencing the end of Indian steam was the nearest I got and it gave me an inkling of what it must have been like. In those days India had a massive metre-gauge network that covered almost the entire country. Now in 2020 most of it has been converted to broad-gauge and electrified. You wouldn’t recognise Jaipur station now.

Over the next week I’ll be adding more – including steam shed depot visits at Delhi, Jaipur and Jodhpur. I’ll also be adding more travel pictures from Australia, so it’s not all about railways.

If you want to see more of the Indian railway scans, follow this link.

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