Actually the pun in the title is inaccurate, as the Fiddlers’ Ferry power station, on the banks of the Mersey between Widnes and Warrington, has been decommissioned; the cooling towers are scheduled for demolition at some point in the future. This view will pass into history at that point. I doubt the horses care, though. Taken on the way to bag my 111th County Top, that of Warrington.
Freight does still make an occasional appearance on the line, usually long trains of wagons marked with ‘Drax’, meaning they are heading to or (in this case) from the power station. Not that you can tell any of this from this extended blur, but I challenge anyone to get a sharp picture of something moving at at least 30mph in the dark. Drax (it’s amazing what you can learn from Wikipedia pages on a Wednesday morning) burns wood imported from the US and Canada, which these trains then ship across the country from Liverpool, with Hebden en route — so we often see these, at all times of day and night.
The line of pylons that reaches over the railway line around Mills Hill station has of late been the subject of building works, as seen here. So this photo fits itself into two vague categories of picture that I have been nurturing recently: blokes high up doing their jobs (like this one) and pictures of power installations taken at high speed from trains, as depicted last week. Do pylons count as ‘architecture’ (a more formal category of picture on this site)? Yes, I think they should. They dominate the landscape as much as any other engineered structure.
Being 42 