12:15.

Well, that was a blast! I’m starting to come down from the buzz of the past few days on ‘3 Peaks by rail’. This morning I heard the fantastic news that the event raised £250,000 for the Railway Children charity which make all the sweat, sprains and sleepless days worthwhile.

Now – after a brief night at home – I’m showered and changed and on my way to Norfolk to catch up with Dawn and her parents at the cottage we’ve rented for the week. I left Halifax on Northern’s 10:03 to Leeds which was (unusually) a five-car train – the first I’ve seen. working the route. I’d hoped to do some writing en-route but the wifi wasn’t working and I couldn’t be bothered setting up the full ‘office’ for the 40 minute journey to Leeds so I relaxed instead. Now I’m on LNER’s 11:05 from Leeds to London as far as Peterborough and editing pictures on the way. I know I’m meant to be on holiday but for freelances that’s an interesting concept as I still have pictures to edit and a magazine article to write! I’m hoping to be able to update yesterdays blog with a few shots later – and (of course) add some pictures to this one too when I’m not dependent on the onboard wifi as (understandably) train companies take a dim view of you file-sharing via their bandwidth.

Right now, we’ve just left Newark, passing a failed Grand Central Class 180 which has been left in disgrace in the sidings. t’s a sad sight. GC are having a torrid time of it at the moment due to such incidents happening on a regular basis. I like the 180s, they’re a good train internally but they’ve suffered with reliability issues throughout their lives. I think it’s time their owners (Angel trains) put them through a life-extension programme and sorted these issues out once and for all. Mind you, it’s not just the 180s that have problems. I’m on a modern nine-car ‘Azuma’ set which has no reservations loaded into the system due to their being a late set-swap. This should have been two-five cars sets so 10 into 9 won’t fit!

13:30.

After a pleasent journey down to an old haunt (Peterborough) I discovered my connection to Norwich was running up to 25 minutes late due to signalling failure – which blew out my next connection and puts me back an hour. Ho hum. The delay gave me time to grab a couple of library pictures before boarding the 2-car Class 158 East Midlands Railway have provided for today’s service. As is tradition with Class 158s the air-conditioning is struggling in the warm weather so I’m glad the train’s only around 60% full.

15:45.

Phew! That 158 was like a sauna. Add in the last few days exertions and lack of sleep and I was soon dozing off. I managed to stay awake to observe the lines of stored diesel trains at Potters of Ely, where a number of ex-East Midlands Railway class 156s are laid up which is annoying as Northern could certainly use ’em, but beyond that sleep soon claimed me. I had 50 mins ‘downtime’ at Norwich where I put the camera to use, and now I’m on my way to my final destination – North Walsham – aboard one of the best trains on the UK network, the Stadler built Class 745s.

The weather here feels muggy with the threat of thunder in the air. A few spots of rain intruded whilst I was waiting for the train but it was half-hearted and never came to anything. I wouldn’t mind a good storm here as you’ll see it for miles in these flatlands.

21:45.

No thunderstorm here in Banningham sadly – just rain. Still, it’s good to be here again although it’s an early night for me and chance to catch-up on some sleep. See you all tomorrow!

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