A little birdy told me that a steam train would be coming through Totnes yesterday morning on its way to Cornwall. As much as I like seeing the steam trains on the preserved lines nothing beats seeing one hammering through a station at 75MPH.
Off I went on the pushie, camera in hand. I wasn't disappointed, it was spectacular.......if you like steam trains.
The rest of the day we just chilled in the sun. I mentioned to Elaine and mum that the steam train would be coming back through Totnes at about 19.30 on its way back to London and they both agreed to come with me to watch it. On the way there we found a back pack by a bus stop - on investigating the contents we found it contained a couple of smelly t shirts, some money, a school yearbook, a defrosted frozen pizza and a nice new Macbook air laptop!
We carried on to the station and awaited the steam train along with a few other enthusiasts plus a lot of people awaiting the express train from Penzance to Paddington. The train was well overdue when they announced the steam train had broken down about 5 miles from Totnes and was blocking the line to London, a rescue train was on its way but it would be about 3 hours before the line reopened!
What a bummer, but I wonder who compensates the Great Western customers waiting to get to London! I can imagine that the regular train companies would like to see the steam trains banned from mainline running!
I rang the cops when we got back to the van re the rucksack and they said that we should to go the Totnes police station in the morning and use the blue phone outside the station and hopefully someone would come and take it from us.
This morning we went to the cop shop. What a palaver! You ring the phone then they ring someone inside the station to ask them to let you in, the problem was that no one in the station wanted to answer the phone! After about 30 mins of waiting and banging on the front door a copper (DC) walked past, who agreed to take it off our hands! He took down our details (on the back of a receipt I had in my pocket and using El's pen!). He rang later and gave us an incident no, if it isn't claimed in 28 days we can have it!!
We popped into the dog friendly Cafe Royale for a full English on the way back to the van. It is a great little dog friendly cafe, they even gave the dogs a couple of snags.
In the afternoon we caught a bus to Paignton.
Mum and Elaine did a prom walk.
Ice creams on the beach.
The seafront part of Paignton is a bit minty and rather chav central.
Once you get away from the seafront and past the station it is quite a nice town.
This evening we had dinner out in The Dartmouth Inn, which was quite a nice little locals boozer, although it did have quite a few boozy locals in it!
Tomorrow we will take the ferry to Dartmouth, weather permitting.
