Tender Behind.

Today was not only my birthday but, also, our ruby wedding anniversary; what better way to spend it than strolling around the York Railway Museum - a little boy's dream.

This exhibit is one of the wheels of the tender behind the steam loco number 673. There was a time when small boys used to gather around railway stations, junctions, bridges, or any combination of all three with notebook and pencil in hand recording the numbers on all the locos that passed. They would return home well after the appointed tea-time, happy, smelly and covered in smuts with a list that would lie, forgotten in a drawer, for many years.

Loco 673 is a Midland Spinner (Class 115) dating from the 1890s, and very handsome it is too. It was last "steamed up" in 1980 for the 150th anniversary of the Rainhill trials.

The reference to the "tender behind" is a very old schoolboy joke - I am, after all, a very old schoolboy.