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Showing posts from October, 2022

Seaside Special - The Cambrian Line: Ceredigion and Gwynedd

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I’d already been travelling for a couple of hours, but the journey only felt like it was properly beginning as we left Shrewsbury. Something to do with the train reversing out of the junction station in the direction it had entered. As if a newly configured service. Where once I had been sat in the front two coaches, as the electronic signage had directed me at the newly rebuilt Birmingham New Street, I was now in the rear two. And on the wrong side for the view of sweeping coastline that I was keenly anticipating from my carefully chosen window seat. Not long out of the station, we skirted the Shrewsbury signal box on the opposite side to my arrival a few minutes earlier. Not just any old junction control housing, though. This was the largest working mechanical signal box in the world. Oh yes.  The conductor appeared. This proved to be the catalyst for a passenger migration only surpassed by the partition of India. Slightly fewer fatalities, in truth. Every time the portly conduct