Peterborough

This is a little friendly town that grew because of the railways. Here the gauges of rails changed and goods had to be manhandled from one steam train and loaded into carriages on another on different width rails. I am afraid I am not as interested in the technicalities of the rail tracks as some people are so I will skip over the details and you can look them up yourself! There is plenty to find, using Google.

A “Y” class loco has been tidied up and put into a display for a feature in the main street. We actually missed seeing it the first time we drove through because it is set back a little from the pavement.

Another notable feature of the town is the number of pubs! There must be a lot of thirsty people living here! The town used to be very much larger because of the number of people employed on the railways – imagine the number of people required to shovel coal from the coal trains on one width of track to another set of wagons on a train on wider tracks. We watched one of the trains heading up to the coal mines and it must have been three kilometers long. In days of steam the length would not have been as great but they would still have been pretty long.

After reading about it from research on the 'net I just had to go and see a little place called “Meldonfield”. This is a private home with a retired couple that has developed a hobby into a paying tourist attraction. Eldon is the coach builder – he hand craft's 12th scale models of wagons and carriages and his wife, Mary, creates the little people that ride on the carriages or tell the story about the carriage.

This picture is of one of the Indian hawkers that travelled the country selling goods. The farms and stations and small country towns depended on these people to bring them such things as material for clothing, cottons and farm hand tools.

A big (very big) project that Eldon has now completed, is the construction of a scale model of the original Peterborough railway station that had been demolished thirty years earlier and the bricks dumped in a dry creek bed. What is incredible is that this couple gathered up some of the bricks and with a brick saw cut them into 12th scale bricks and from these bricks constructed this amazing replica using the original architects plans to do so.

Foolishly the Council of Peterborough will not create a place to house this in the main street where it would be of interest to tourists, so it will remain at the home of the Zimmermans. For a reason that I cannot understand, there is unwillingness to let it go to the big steam museum “Steamtown”.

Being interested in gardens I dragged Colin along to the Dragon Gardens. This area has very little rainfall and I was totally blown away with the variety of plants the owners have been able to grow. The colour and layout was stunning. Unfortunately the man of the house fell through a roof only yesterday and has a couple of broken ribs and is very unwell at the moment so our hostess had to keep disappearing to check up on him. We quietly enjoyed her efforts and took quite a lot of photos. I even found a few dragons!

I thought you might be more interested in seeing them than seeing the flowers!

AJ