Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
This old puffer-nutter is chuffed to see steam again
FORGET about leaving your heart in San Francisco.
I left my stick in Oxenhope Millennium Green, which could have been a much bigger disaster.
Thankfully, I remembered a few hundred yards later, walking the rock-strewn Bronte Way down the Worth Valley to Haworth.
This is the second time in as many walks I’ve left it behind. As I warn young people, don’t get old!
It was a wonderful day out. Blue sky, fresh air, a clear beck running by the path and trees just coming into leaf. A notice board gave information about all the flora and fauna to look out for, if I kept quiet.
I didn’t see a kingfisher, but I did see a rather haughty heron standing by a side stream, and a string of horses ambled by.
Nature I love best, said the poet Walter Savage Landor, and next to Nature, Art.
He might have added “and steam engines”.
This was the first day that heritage railways had been allowed to operate for many months, and I hoped to see the first train of the day on the Keighley and Worth Valley. My luck was in. A group of fellow puffer-nutters gathered in a field, cameras at the ready, told me it was due. Minutes later, it came charging up the gradient, a sight as splendid as anything in nature.
At the head of four vintage maroon coaches, Midland 0-6-0 Four-freight (for the cognoscenti) 43924, resplendent in black, looked as fresh as the day it was turned out of Derby locomotive works in 1920.
Every head was turned at the sight, which could have come straight out of the classic 1970 movie, The Railway Children, filmed on this line. That made my day.