Grabbing a quick coffee and cake at the Café @ The Word because I'm nearly half an hour early for the ferry across the Tyne. Sounds better than four minutes late :-)
Seen under the road bridge along the way from Percy Main to the Stephenson Railway Museum
Is this some kind of railway buffer? The path I was on was straight enough for a railway and there is an otherwise inexplicable kink in the path that suggests that originally there might have been a set of points behind where I was standing and that there was a spur ending at the buffer. I'm facing roughly south looking at this object.
Notice the deep buffer plate. Apparently this made it easier to get the loco back on the track after a derailment by preenting the engine from falling so far down. This one was used in an iron mine I think.
I wonder if that locomotive has been run at some point much more recently than its career. The clue is that gauge-glass on the back of the boiler, indicating the water-level, and perhaps fitted long after the locomotive was built.
I may be wrong but I don't think that device had been invented in the Hollingworth Billy's youth: engine-drivers in its time relied on small test-taps at various heights.
I rarely visit the North-East of England. Last time was to attend, by invitation, a friend's ordination in Newcastle Cathedral; and that was quite some years ago. I think I'd rather like to visit that museum.
Got to the platform at the North Shields Metro station just as the train was arriving. Perfect timing from the ferry but anyone not used to a brisk walk and a bit of a climb would have missed it.
It's quite a pleasant walk from Percy Main station to the Stephenson Railway Museum, about 1.8 km along an almost dead straight tarmac path through the woods beside the steam railway. It did start to drizzle very slightly in the last 300 m but not enough to make it worth unwrapping my rain jacket.
So now I'm in the Waggonway Tea Room having a pot of tea and a warmed cheese scone.
That welded-steel object looks more like art than any railway artefact.
The last photograph shows there was a siding or a loop to the left, possibly joining the running line at that bend beyond the bridge. I take it that's what you questioned. There might have been another siding to the left again, under the second span.
Looking at the squalid mess on the bridge wall and steel fabrication, whatever possesses the squalid perpetrators? If they want to be artistic they should take proper art lessons, not merely use (stolen?) spray-paint to deface others' property.
