A roadside meeting

Driving to Dorset was pleasantly rewarding. I passed through Bath with ease, unusually, before heading south along the Fosse Way, formerly a roman road, which took me to Somerset. The weather was still grey and drizzly, and unsurprisingly the vegetation was green and lush considering the damp conditions of the last couple of months.

When I passed Yeovil the sky began to clear as I drove along another roman road towards Dorchester on my way to visit Patrick, my old friend who I met at school. I left the he fast and busy road roman road as it was running downhill along a chalk ridge, not far from Cerne Abbas. The minor road I joined was another world, as it headed down into the village in a hollow-way between hedged fields, with flowers overflowing and birds in abundance.

A few hundred yards before the village, which sits in the valley bottom of yet another River Frome, I approached a hump backed bridge, which I knew was over the railway between Yeovil to Dorchester. This gentleman was leaning over as if watching a train approaching, and I immediately remembered that a steam train was visiting this line this weekend. I quickly pulled up and parked, and walked back to the bridge and engaged him in conversation.

He was there to see a steam engine but not the one I had heard about. He explained that it would be running light, without carriages, from Dorchester all the way to Yeovil, where it could be turned round on a turntable for its return trip with its passengers to London, pointing in the right direction.

The engine didn't arrive whilst I waited there, but we had an enjoyable conversation about the old days of the railways, on which he had worked for 45 years till his retirement to Weymouth, about twenty miles away. Strangely enough, he had visited Stroud the weekend before, to go to the old bus festival which seems to happen annually now.

Whilst we talked he was constantly looking over the bridge to see if the engine could be seen coming through the short tunnel further down the track. I took the opportunity to take his picture. I just wish I could have recorded his wonderful Dorset voice too. We said goodbye and I went on my way the last mile to see Patrick.