I recall going to the Railway Museum in York in the 1960's. In those days it was adjacent to York Railway Station itself, and was reached via a narrow entrance alongside the rather forbidding-looking Railway Institute building. When it became the National Railway Museum, it moved to its present location near the Clifton Marshalling Yards.



A fond memory of mine; when five or six years old, I used to play on the sand dunes at Mawdlam Common, south of Port Talbot. The enormous marsalling yards for the Port Talbot steel works stretched this far. Trains used to wait in the yards for anything up to two days before loading or unloading. I remember chatting to guards in the brake vans at the end of long trains, which were inching forward at slow walking pace.

All sorts of grimy nondescript locomotives could be seen in this part of the world. One day I saw one of the BR Class 9F locomotives (same class as "Evening Star") travelling light through the yard. It had recently been cleaned, and the effect was like watching the "Queen Mary" steam past a collection of dredgers.