Steamy Pickering - 6th April 2008

Due to our being inundated with a request to continue blogging our activities over here in England, Maria and Fletch Abroad is back and the same as ever! As a result we have decided to organise interesting weekend activities to provide fodder for the blog. It’s a real trial I can assure you, but we do it for our adoring public.

For our first weekend after returning from our Easter holidays, we decided to check out the Spring Steam Festival. There is a railway line operated by a bunch of enthusiasts called the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. This particular weekend they had some visiting steam engines running on the line as well as their own stock. We grabbed Antonio, a colleague of Fletch’s who happens to live in the flat below us, filled up a thermos and drove from Hull up to Pickering, a journey of just over an hour.

Pickering station was extremely crowded and we had some difficulty getting a seat on the 2 pm train, as much of the train was given over to dining carriages for Sunday lunch. Drawn by Bittern, a Gresley A4 class locomotive which once pulled the King’s Cross to Newcastle leg of The Flying Scotsman, the train’s 18 mile journey to Grosmont was extraordinarily picturesque despite the weather which by this time had turned decidedly soggy.

Grosmont houses the maintenance sheds for many of the NYMR’s locomotives and we spent an hour or so having a goosy gander at the various steam engines before jumping on a train pulled by a similar locomotive called Union of South Africa. By now the weather had turned decidedly wintery, and the journey back to Pickering felt quite like Christmas.

The roads driving back to Hull were quite treacherous and we decided to do something that involved less driving the next weekend.