It's been quite a while since my last blog post though as there have been a fair few new galleries added to the site in the last four and a half months, I certainly have not given up photographing steam trains!

I certainly enjoyed the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway's four day Cotswold Steam Festival at the end of May, and that was followed by a visit to the National Railway Museum in York for the Great Gathering of the six surviving members of Sir Nigel Gresley's masterpiece A4 class.

Great Gathering PanoramaThe six surviving members of Sir Nigel Gresley's iconic A4 class stand together around the turntable in the National Railway Museum's Great Hall.

The Great Gathering showed the best of what the NRM can do, and was certainly popular with the general public.   Such was the queue to get in that I'm really glad that I managed to book a place on one of the early morning photo shoots, allowing the opportunity to photograph the A4s and the other exhibits without hordes of other people getting into every shot.

Our summer holiday this year was a very relaxing and enjoyable three week trip by train to Paris, Portugal and Northern Spain.   Although I had planned the trip to include a historical train journey along part of the Douro Valley in Portugal, the persistent hot weather and dry conditions meant that we had a diesel  locomotive on the train instead.   The only steam locomotives that I saw were a number of mostly uncared for static relics, slowly rusting to oblivion, though it was a pleasant surprise to see CP 0-4-0T no. E1 stuffed and mounted at Regua as I had seen this engine in use shunting the yard there on my last trip to Portugal in 1982.

IMG_1162_DxOHenschel 0-4-0T no. E1 sits in splendid isolation opposite Regua station platforms. I last saw this locomotive in 1982 when it was in use shunting the yard serving the metre gauge branch to Villa Real.

September is the start of the Autumn Gala season, and this year has already seen major events at the Pontypool & Blaenavon Railway and Severn Valley Railway.   Having missed out on last years SVR extravaganza, I made sure that I got the most out of a trip to the valley this year by attending on both the Saturday and Sunday of the gala.   I have to admit though, that I found staying awake for 36 hours much harder than I had expected!

5DM33794_DxOGWR 28xx class 2-8-0 no. 2857 stands at Kidderminster awaiting the 05:22 departure time of its next working to Bridgnorth.

Now it's fingers crossed for some dry weather over the coming weekend as I intend to the galas at the West Somerset and Great Central railways...