Any opportunity...

Is it wildly inappropriate to take photos of oneself at railway stations, on the way to a funeral? Possibly. But undeterred that's what I did. The funeral in question took place in the South Yorkshire town of Wombwell, but that was never served by the North Eastern Railway (just the Midland and the Great Central) so of course, never appeared on the Big Tile Map. However, on my way, I had to change trains at Leeds, so here we go:

Leeds

Luckily, the Wombwell train (the 09:33 to Sheffield, via Castleford), was departing from platform 17A, which is well out of the way of the crowds so I didn't feel like a total bell-end taking a photo of myself. The train shown was unfortunately not the one I was to board - I got lumbered with a crappy bus-on-rails Pacer thing - possibly a class 143? but it did the job, and got me to Wombwell exactly on time.

Wombwell station (formerly Wombwell West) isn't very exciting. It's got a plastic bus shelter waiting room, and a ticket machine, but that's about it. Oh well, at least it's still open.

After a short wait, by the park & ride car park, I was collected by Squirrille (last mentioned in this blog in a post about Sandsend I think), and she drove me the mile or so up to the church.

The funeral went without any major incidents (although the priest who read the eulogy had a really annoying voice - like Unlucky Alf from The Fast Show), but was incredibly long. I think it took over 2 hours in all - a full requiem job, as the deceased was himself also a priest. There were bishops and deacons and other random clergy milling about all over the place. At one point I thought I'd accidentally walked into the set of Father Ted!

When it was all over, rather than go to the cemetery for the burial, we decamped to Wetherspoon's on the High Street, for wine and a pie (so much cheaper than the ones round here!), then went to look at the grave afterwards, once everyone else had gone.

So Squirrille could drink more wine, we then drove over to Wath-on-Dearne and went to another Wetherspoon's by her house. As it was after 4pm, the wine was down to £4.99 a bottle! Bargain.

When it was time to set off home, rather than returning to Wombwell, I got the bus over to Bolton-on-Dearne, and got the train back from there instead. Bolton is the most southerly NER station on the Big Tile Map - sort of like this blog's equivalent of Lands End I suppose, so I took the required picture. Please bear in mind I'd had a shitload to drink by this point...

Bolton-upon-Dearne

I've waited for so many trains in Bolton over the years - it's the place my grandmother used to live (not on the station, obviously, but not far away on Station Road). It used to have a big brick building on the northbound platform, which in the mid 1980s was derelict (I think most of South Yorkshire was derelict in the 1980s), and I have fond memories of standing under the rusting iron canopy, and floating leaves in the puddles where water seeped through the broken glass. 

It's totally different nowadays, the buildings are all gone, and they've taken away the foot crossing with the little traffic lights to tell you when it was safe to cross the lines. Now there's a bridge, with an incredibly long disabled access ramp, and lots of new fencing, and CCTV cameras watching your every move, but in my mind, it'll always secretly be 1986, and I'll be going to Nanny Millie's house to eat hotdog sausages, or a Mr Kipling almond slice...

Atonement

Watched Atonement last night - beautiful film, but really bloody miserable - so today's PlatformCat experience comes straight from the beaches of Dunkirk (or, at least, the very top bit of North Yorkshire).

After twenty million hours on buses (via a Scotch egg, and a "Midget" (?) pork pie. in a rainstorm in Guisborough), I finally arrived at some sort of post-war council estate by Marske Cricket Ground. My newest OS map (covering Middlesbrough ad Hartlepool) directed me, through a selection of winding boulevards and crescents, until I finally reached Marske station. Marske is on the Northern Rail line from Middlesbrough to Saltburn, but I didn't wait for a train...

Marske

After various failed attempts at getting a decent selfie, I finally got one I didn't hate, and headed off towards the coast. Towards Middlesbrough, the next station is Longbeck, and then Redcar East, but they weren't built when the Big Tile Map was produced, so I chose to ignore them entirely, for the sake of accuracy. I trotted off down the High Street, which is actually quite nice - so much better than I expected. Architectually it's quite moorland-village-y, despite it's proximity to dirty Teesside, with little shops and cottages - one of which is now a folk museum called "Winkie's Castle", but sadly it was closed for the day...

The rain that dampened my baked-goods in Guisborough was long gone now, and as I crossed the dunes and made my way onto the beach, the sun was high in the sky. It was windy and cold (much more autumnal than you'd expect for August), but the sky was blue and it was really, really beautiful. And it was so empty! Apart from a few dog-walkers, I had miles of sand to myself! A splendid way to get rid of the day's hangover! (Oops!)

But anyway, as Marske receded into the distance behind me, the only sounds were the sea, the odd  tweeting sandpiper, and crickets in the dunes. My face was gradually covered in a layer of salt, from the wind whipping spray into the air - thankfully the lack of passers-by meant nobody saw me licking my beard to taste it...

I didn't find any treasure on the beach. The best I could manage was a pink glittering heart, made of felt, a selection of assorted flipflops (including a matching pair, over a mile apart - murder vistim perhaps?), and a large dead jellyfish. Or, at least, I presume it was dead. I'm not sure how you're supposed to tell.

I gave up on beach-walking, and made my way up onto the dunes instead, which almost as abruptly became a concrete promenade, as I approached the suburbs of Redcar.

Now, what to say about Redcar? From what I saw of it today, the town itself is fairly boring, and a bit shabby, but the seafront... well, let's just say I think that's where the council spend their money. Who needs decent shops when you could have an array of bizarre and entertaining public artworks?

I must have passed at least thirty different sculptures. My favourite was definitely the group of cast iron penguins hanging around a bin, but there were so many others - the thing that looked like a squid crossed with a flaming boat, the wooden camel on a roundabout that may or may not have been being ridden by the Virgin Mary, the creepy metal scene of Mister Punch being attacked by a crocodile - there was even a pair of knitted octopi attached to a fence!

If Redcar was just about sculptures, I'm sure people would come from far and wide. But...

It's not.

Sadly for the town's tourist industry, the view north is dominated by industry. The place really is a frontier - look to the right and it's all cliffs and moors, but look left and there's chimneys and smoke and conveyor belts and... well, it's basically the edge of Middlesbrough. If you breathed in hard enough it'd probably taste like a chemical-flavoured parmo...

But anyway - ignoring all that, by now I was right in the middle of where they filmed the Dunkirk scenes of Atonement. Since it was made in 2007 there's been quite a lot of sea-defence works, so it looks somewhat different, but the main features are still obvious. The houses on the landward side are still the same, and the stub-end of Coatham Pier (now a manky-looking cinema) is there, but alas, I didn't see James McAvoy... Gutted.

I wandered up Station Road (there must be hundred of those round the country), to Redcar Central and took a picture of myself on the footbridge between the platforms. The trainshed has been bricked up to form business units, so the services to Saltburn and inland have to sneak their way round the sides, but at least it's still open...

On the footbridge at Redcar 

Originally I'd got a vague plan of somehow carrying on towards Middlesbrough today, but I couldn't be bothered, so I bought a bottle of apple juice, and waited for the next bus towards Whitby, where I digress...

Surprisingly, Whitby station - for a long time a virtually abandoned backwater - has just opened a new platform!  Instead of being an awkward single track (practically a siding), it's now a proper terminus with two platforms, and the facility for locomotive hauled trains to run-around. I'm not sure who paid for it, but I think it was Network Rail.

You don't get that every day...

Travels to Distant Lands

After what seemed liked eternity on Arriva buses - with a short break for pie acquisition in Guisborough - I finally arrived on the outskirts of Stokesley, for yesterday's new quest. First impressions of the place weren't overly good - there was a boarded-up church, a lot of roadworks, and a group of skanky-looking teenage chavgirls, eating fish and chips at the bus stop. 

With my pie safely hidden in my bag (I'd eaten the Scotch egg already), I strode off purposefully down the imaginatively-named Station Road, hoping the tracksuit-bedecked slappers wouldn't follow.Thankfully, they didn't, and soon the suburbs of Stokesley were left behind.

Stokesley - please excuse the grimace. The sun was in my eyes.

Stokesley's closed station is about a mile or so from the town centre, and is now some sort of office premises - it's all very neat and tidy, and even the signalbox survives, despite having closed nearly fifty years ago. Alas, the same can't be said for the Station Hotel, across the road, which is looking decidedly derelict - their Christmas decorations look like they've been up for rather a long time...

Continuing my wander, I turned off the main road down a farm track, and over a bridge across the abandoned railway line. My route then continued past a row of cottages, and through a field scattered with oddments of random unidentifiable junk, and a couple of rather skinny horses. I met the former railway formation again at what was presumably once a level crossing. The lineside fencing had disappeared in the intervening years since closure, but the pedestrian stiles remained, poking up out of the nettles, and covered in bindweed like some sort of rural art installation.

The village of Great Broughton was passed through almost without me even noticing, and I made my way along a minor road (or perhaps in this part of the world, it counts as a major road? I'm not sure...), heading east through a mixture of farmland and forest. The village of Little Broughton really did go unnoticed - apparently it was abandoned in medieval times, and it's remains are marked on the OS map, but I didn't see any sign of it.

Ingleby Greenhow was a more substantial place than either of the Broughtons. I called into St Andrew's church, and gave them a donation for a leaflet about local history, and then made my way up the main street, towards my next destination. 

I passed the pub (which surprised me with the fact it was actually open), and a rather grand Butchers shop advertising half-pigs for 85 quid. That'd make a hell of a lot of pork pies...

As the houses receded into the distance behind me, it started to spit with rain, but just as quickly the sun came back out again. Ingleby's old station (the North Eastern Railway never bothered with the "Greenhow" suffix), is now a pretty house, with neat lawns between the platforms where the tracks once lay. The goods yard, at the back, has been gravelled, and the coal drops remain, as storage sheds and garages.

Ingleby

After taking the requisite photo, my next destination was Battersby, where I was planning on catching one of the four westbound trains of the day. I had about half an hour, before it was due, and if I missed it, it would mean an extra three and a half miles of walking back to the nearest bus stop, but according to my OS map, it wasn't very far, if I followed the footpath across the fields.

Unfortunately, what the OS map didn't tell me was that one of the fields had a herd of cows in it, all crowding about just the other side of the stile... Since the cow incident at Marishes Road, earlier in the year, I'm hugely wary of them, so I considered turning back and walking the long way round, along the road, but that would have meant probably missing the train...

Decision time. Instead of running the risk of being trampled to death by walking beefburgers, I climbed over some barbed wire, into some nettles, and crossed a cow-less field instead, which then required a further leap over an electric fence at the other side, but at least I made it to Battersby, with time to spare

Battersby

Battersby station is a strange place. It doesn't serve anywhere in particular - it's used to be a junction, but now is just an awkward reversing point, but at least means the driver of the Middlesbrough to Whitby train gets to stretch his legs and get some fresh air. It's also occasionally used by steam specials from the North York Moors Railway, and consequently still has a functioning water column at the end of the platform, which probably makes it unique, or certainly a rarity these days...

I caught the 13:16 train to Great Ayton, one stop away. I didn't have time to buy anything from the trolley, as the journey was short - so short the guard didn't bother coming through to sell me a ticket. Hurrah for freebies! 

Great Ayton - not such a great station though...

Great Ayton station is not very impressive, just a small 1970s-looking brick shed, on a single platform, but the village it serves is actually quite nice. It was the first time I've ever been there, and I was pleased with what I found. I was imagining a one-horse town, perhaps with a closed pub, but there was a museum, a good assortment of shops, even a tattooist and kebab-shop! (Next door to each other, not combined...)

In a small park by the river, there was also a restored Victorian cast-iron urinal, looking for all intents and purposes like a massive postbox. Alas, it was not in use, and the replacement brick-built loos over the road, although serving a useful purpose, were a bit smelly, and full of flies...

The day's wanderings were now successfully completed, and as the next bus wasn't for a while there was time for a cheeky pint in The Royal Oak, while I contemplated the long journey back home...