When the 07:42 cattle truck to Manchester turns up half an hour late, like it did this morning, you can be damn sure there’ll be a few people wanting to get on it. Why was I not among them? Because there was another three carriages along three minutes later, with blissful peace on board. Take this picture as an illustration of how humans typically fail to delay gratification.
11 years of using the Calderdale line, and one learns which services have CTS (Cattle Truck Status) and which are safer. I will never aim to catch the 1726 from Manchester, for example. It just ain’t worth it. The 0742 from Hebden (depicted here just about on its arrival to Manchester) is usually not so bad but today, for some reason, it suffered from a massive case of CTS.
Why monochrome again? Because it hides a multitude of white balance sins.
Second shot in a row of one or more of my commuting colleagues. Possibly he is lamenting the loss of his sunglasses — though I suspect more likely just to be tired…
More distinctive, though still trivial, is the fact that after years of passing through this place on a regular basis, this is the first of these blog posts to be definitively taken in Rochdale; we were stopped taking on passengers at that station. Place 176 on the official list, anyway.
Still hot — and still schlepping into Manchester most of the week on non-air-conditioned trains. The summer holiday approaches, but it’s not here yet.
The idea for this photo came bit by bit, as I sat on the train down to London looking at the first picture in the sequence, which is of Hebden Bridge station. Decided to take a photo of that on the screen for some reason and then just ran with it. I suppose I could have gone further and further, but I did have other work to do….
Another trip down South, meaning another morning change of trains at Leeds station — so many shots have been taken here. I like the general pinkness of this shot and the everyday stance of the two human subjects. Mundane it may be, but attractive, I think.
A day early too. We all need a break — me, him and indeed the trains, which stop running into Manchester for the next 10 days, just for the hell of it really. Who cares: I’m now off work until the 4th April. Happy Easter.
I’m examining a doctoral thesis in Glasgow tomorrow and it’s too far to do as a day trip so I came up tonight. This shot was snapped during a spell of good light on the train, somewhere around Carlisle. The Mac shows that I’m still just about working at this point but it wasn’t to last much longer — then again, you try assimilating Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge past 5pm on a Thursday. But then again I did have wine (as seen bottom left).
Still occasionally to be seen on small, provincial British railways. This monster bombed through Hebden Bridge station slightly in advance of the 8:05 to Manchester, headed for unknown places.
This rail bridge takes the train (in this case a freight) between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Oxford Road stations. The building in the background is the Faraday building, late of the University but now empty and awaiting demolition. I like the general drabness of this shot — very January, although it was a sunny and crisp day today.
Being 42 