We’re at the start of a new week so it’s back to blogging for me after taking the weekend off as it was rather a sociable one, which left me neither the time nor the inclination to type-swipe but now my nose is firmly back to the grindstone as I plan another busy week. A chunk of today’s been spent doing exactly that, working out the logistics of another foray to Northumberland on Thursday. Thankfully, the weather’s beginning to improve. We didn’t have any rain here in the Calder valley today, which feels like a minor miracle. Instead we had this strange bright orb hanging around in the sky. In a few days time we’re even meant to have temperatures in the 20s – a figure we’ve not seen for ages, so I’d better make the most of it.

Another of today’s consuming jobs was to wade through the archives to collate a collection of community rail pictures for a magazine. I sometimes forget just how large the archive is nowadays. There’s over 84,000 pictures on my Zenfolio website alone, and that doesn’t include all the other folders of filed-away images and there’s only little-old me to remember where the damn things are! With that in mind I’ve also edited, sifted and filed away a lot of the images I took last week before they start overwhelming my hard-drive and so that they’re duplicated. Even though a selection’s on my website I’m still cautious about having everything backed-up, just in case. Still, that’s all done now. I’ve even managed to parcel up some of the latest eBay sales tonight so they’ll be in the post tomorrow. All in all – a productive day.

The only question now is what the picture of the day is going to be. Oh, I know, here’s one from the archives of how Northumberland’s industrial landscape used to look like. Here’s the old west coal staithes at Blyth, seen on the 27th December 1989, when I was staying in the area with friends that Christmas.

The staithes were used as a location for the iconic 1971 film ‘Get Carter’ starring Michael Caine. Now little remains of this scene. Blyth power station closed in 2001 and has been demolished whilst the upper decks of the staithes were torn down in 1994. The railway sidings that stabled the wagons of coal are also long gone. Here’s a link to another picture I took of them at that time.

I hope I have time to explore this area again later in the week. We’ll see…

I’ve a small favour to ask…
If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website –  https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/

Or – you can now buy me a coffee! https://ko-fi.com/paulbigland68312