Trains

Day out in Swindon today, with a visit to the Steam Museum of the Great Western Railway.  The museum itself was nice and quiet - though there were lots of dads taking their kids out for the day.  The shopping centre next door looked to be very busy.

We've visited the York Railway Museum a few times, but this was a very different experience - less actual trains, more about how they used to make trains on the site, up until the 1980s.  As some of Sharon's ancestors were involved in building carriages and engines (on London & Southern not GWR), this was interesting to us.

There were several excellent screens around the museum showing short snippets of how the different areas of the works would have been run, from making moulds, to casting the metal parts and using them to construct engines.  These often featured people who were part of the workforce when the site was open, telling their own stories.

The main blip shows the area where the trains were assembled, this example during the second world war.  The extra shows one of the locomotives that were on display, King George V.