Mangapps Railway Museum

Today it is 200 years since the start of passenger railway travel in Britain! On 27th September 1825, George Stephen's Locomotion No. 1 travelled from Shildon to Stockton with a few hundreds of people on board.  This was a massive day in the history of travel and journeys.  As someone who spends almost 2 hours a day on board a train, this is hugely important to my life! I only realised this anniversary about 10 minutes ago as I was listening to Radio 3's Train Tracks show with music and words relating to train travel.  You can read more about it here and catch up on BBC sounds.

It's totally serendipitous, therefore, that I was going to publish my visit to a railway museum.

I hope you enjoy my day out with trains!

Back in mid-August, CBC's brother and his partner came out to see us and had a day out together.  We went out cycling and ended up cycling to Essex Marina to take the Burnham ferry (it's a motorboat that travels in the Summer months) to Burnham-on-Crouch.  This town is served by a branch railway line and you arrive on the jetty in the centre of town.  Sadly, the guy who has been running it for years has recently had to give up the business due to some sort of life-changing health condition and it's being currently run by a new owner and helped out by some other sailors.  The guy who picked us up used to be a Police-diver.

In Burnham, we went to go and have some fish and chips for lunch from Essex's best fish-and-chip shop and after a tea and cake in a nice cafe next door, we cycled onto our next destination,  Mangapps railway museum!

Run entirely by volunteers and on private land, this is a railway museum with lots to see and do.

We saw this old tube train outside as we arrived.

Inside there is loads of wonderful old signs and posters and benches.

It is quite extensive inside but not overwhelming somewhere vast like York railway museum.

You could get onto and up close to lots of the stock.

Every hour, you can take a short train ride to the other end of the field!

You could tell the volunteers LOVE what they do!

I miss trains being like this!!! Honestly, more comfortable than the current ones!

At the end of the field, we got out for a stop.

It was  Diesel running that day but they do have steam days.

Here was our noble steed.

Here's a rare picture of CBC!

The volunteers were very knowledgeable!

I enjoyed looking in the station master's office and a waiting room and a signal box!

There's SO many pieces of history to look at.

One couple got to have a go at changing the signals. We were in a bit of a hurry to see round as we had arrived fairly close to closing time so wanted to see round rather than try this.

You can see the signals change as you do it which was very cool and see what safety measures are in place to stop an accident.

You could go inside most of the trains and there were items relating to railway people and their jobs, model trainsets and much more.

I really enjoyed having a wander through this tube train by myself!

I used to love those black shiny handholds when I was a child!

Here's the signal box you could climb!

 We really enjoyed it and I really recommend you go to visit it if you are ever in Essex. Here's the website for details.  You can get there by train by travelling from Liverpool Street to Wickford where you change for the Southminster line (usually only one an hour) and go to Burnham-on-Crouch. Many people like to go crabbing here too!

After this, we cycled back towards Burnham and got the return ferry before cycling back home. We took them out to dinner and then they headed back to London.

Daleks in Hexham!

On the 21st August, CBC and I travelled to Hexham to go and stay with and visit CBC's Mother as mentioned in my previous post.  

On the Saturday morning, we were going to head into Hexham but CBC and his Mum were taking ages so I decided to walk by myself and meet them later.

As I arrived and was passing the Queen's Hall, I needed the bathroom so I went in.  This was very serendipitous as there was a Doctor Who and Sci-Fi exhibition taking place in there which someone had told me about ages ago but I'd forgotten!

The exhibition was put on in conjunction with Neil Cole and his Museum of Classic Sci-Fi in Allendale which I visited a couple of years ago.

I got to snuggle up to a Dalek!

Neil has props and reconstructions from other classic Sci-fi films and series too.

Here are some  great Doctor Who baddies including Tzim Sha from Jodie Whittaker's 13th Doctor's debut episode, The Woman Who fell to Earth.

He's covered in teeth which are souvenirs from those he has killed!

And here are some costumes from Classic Who-  a sinister Daffodil man from Terror of the Autons, a Vervoid from A trial of a Timelord...

There were some costumes from The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood and Doctor Who.

Here is a costume worn by Elisabeth Sladen and the blouse is currently unindentified... I was about 5 cm away from this and it was SOOOO tempting to reach out and try and see where the label was from. I didn't, of course, but I did email Neil Cole and ask him if he knew what brand it was.  He said the costume belonged to someone in Wales but put me in touch with him and hopefully, he might be able to have a look for me though he thinks it might have been cut out! I would love to be able to tell my friend Gretchen where it comes from as she has a blog dedicated to Sarah Jane's costumes!

Same with this pink blouse and vest-top!

Here's the line up of costumes.

Martha wore this in the Family of Blood!

Neil used to be an art teacher before he began the museum and many of the exhibits were made by himself and there are many of his illustrations too, like this one below!

 It was great to be able to be able to see all the exhibits and get SO close to them in excellent lighting! The museum itself, in Allendale is well worth a visit  if you are ever in Northumberland.

xx

Antwerp Day 3- Chocolate, churches and charity shops!

It's been a while since my last post on our Antwerp holiday!  I finally managed to get some photos copied across.

On our Monday in Antwerp, we woke up fairly late and after a lazy breakfast, had to hotfoot it across town on the Velo hire bikes to near the railway station. We had booked to go to Antwerp's Chocolate Museum. Having been to, and loved the Bruges Chocolate museum in 2019, I was excited for this one.

We arrived and put our bags in lockers.  They told us that the whole exhibit was Covid safe with nothing we needed to touch and was timed with all doors to sections so that people in groups didn't have to have any contact with other people. It was very clever.

The whole museum was really interesting with a detailed history of chocolate from bean to processing, to wrapping to all the different types and important Chocolatiers. It was hugely informative and fun to see.

One part of the exhibition showed you a vintage Belgium chocolatier and you got to hear from the woman who ran it (a reenaction)

One part showed some of the most iconic individual chocolates and their shapes in massive form

and introduced you to the great innovators in chocolate.  Here above is the Guylian shell.  Apparently, the most recent innovation was a truly new type of chocolate- Ruby Chocolate!

There were a few sections where you could see chocolatiers decorating and making chocolates.  There are opportunities to join demonstrations but sadly there were none when we were there which was sad as I ADORED this part of the Bruge chocolate museum!

This section here was where they introduced us to the ethical side of chocolate making and how the Chocolate Line is trying to support the communities who harvest and grow cocoa for them.

There were many 'instagram photo' type locations for you to take your picture.

As we progressed through, I became more and more disappointed at the lack of opportunities to TRY any chocolate.  At the Bruges one, there were chocolate button dispensers in various places.

 

It was only in the last room (before the shop), that we FINALLY got to try some chocolate. We were met by a lady who handed us a spoon each and showed us how to operate these melted chocolate machines.  They would dispense a sample of melted chocolate of all the different blends and combinations onto your spoon.  We started with those blends with a really large cocoa content and progressed to lots of different ones including the aforementioned ruby chocolate.

The warm liquid chocolate was delicious!!  We even managed a couple of samples of a few of them as the lady just left you to it!

We went into the shop where CBC chose some presents and some treats.

We then made a hasty stampede towards St Charles Borromeo church where I would be meeting one of my favourite Belgium blogger, the wonderful Ann!

We were pretty hungry and went into a nearby cafe where we ordered some food, hoping it would arrive quickly (which it didn't!).  Luckily, Ann was lovely enough to come and join us whilst we ate out lunch!

It was SOOOOO exciting to see Ann in real life after seeing her in beautiful pictures for so long! She is just as beautiful and stylish  in real life as she is in her photos!  She's also so incredibly kind and friendly! I've often been incredulous over Ann's writing- there is no way I could write in a language other than my native one in such an idiomatic way than Ann does and she is JUST the perfect person to chat to! It's so nice to be able to be able to natter and talk about those things you can't when typing.

Once we'd eaten our lunch, we headed to St Charles Borromeo- a well known Baroque church. It was built in the 1600's.  Sadly, the original 39 ceiling paintings by Rubens and lots of other works were destroyed, around about 100 years after it was built, in a fire.

It looks fairly undecorative from the outside, but the inside is WONDERFUL!

There is a wonderful Rubens altar painting.

The church is crammed full of things to look at- marblework, wood carvings, paintings and decorative floors. The organ is pretty exciting too!

There were confession booths here- so intricate!

After this, We headed off to......yes.....THINK TWICE!  For anyone who does not read Ann's blog, Think Twice is the most incredible Secondhand clothing chain in Belgium who have a very vast array of vintage clothes at reasonable prices.  They then have sale days where items get progressively cheaper until the final day where EVERYTHING is 1Euro! Ann is the Think Twice queen!

I was fortunate enough to be there with Ann on the penultimate 2 Euro day!  Because of Covid measures, we had to queue outside. At which point, CBC took himself off to go and seek a loo, which gave Ann and I an opportunity to have a proper chat which wouldn't bore him through not knowing all the things we were talking about!  Her we are in the T2 queue! You can see the T2 poster advertising the sale on the window!

We finally made it into the shop!   We walked around and realised we were very compatible shopping partners, showing each other things we though the other would like and giggling about things!  The selection was really good! 

We both ended up making purchases- Ann one skirt and me, a couple of items to add to my previous purchases from an alternative T2 I'd visited the previous day (there are FOUR in Antwerp!)

I was really sad when we had to leave so I walked with Ann to meet Jos, her husband, who was coming to pick her up in the car.  It was really lovely to meet him too!

We'd had SUCH  a jolly, easy time and I felt SO privileged to be able to meet someone who has become a good friend via blogland over the past few years! The nice thing was that we ended up texting each other all through my visit (and beyond) and it made my holiday that bit extra special that I had a friend who I could share my adventures with, who knew exactly what and where I was talking about! Ann had already given me lots of brilliant suggestions for places to visit!

That evening, CBC and I headed out to dinner to a bistro near Volkstraat which served some traditional Belgian dishes and I took the opportunity to choose the dish Ann had mentioned to be earlier when we asked about traditional Belgian dishes. I THINK it was called Endives au Jambon. Apparently endives or chicory was dicovered by a Belgian farmer in 1830.

CBC and I are HUGE Chicory fans so I was gleeful to try it.

As you can see, I was served the most ENORMOUS portion- that's my hand right next to it! It was IMMENSE.

A thick layer of bechamel cheese sauce with ham rolls and lots of endives plus mashed potato.

I discovered, after wadingt through one half, that all the MASHED potato was on the side I left till last and I'd eaten all the endives and ham on the left so my meal ended up being rather heavy-going on the mash at the end but it was a GREAT choice.  CBC had the beef stew. Yes, he forgo his veggie ways to try it. When in Belgium....

It had been a rather wonderful day and I wondered what would be next?

Oh...you want to see my T2 purchases????

Well, as well as the two skirts I showed in previous posts (the red daisy one and the blue/purple stripy glittery one, plus a woven leather belt), I bought the above.

Most useful were the navy camisole and the corduroy rose skirt which I wore whilst there. I've now worn everything except the rainbow dress and the teal top!

Oh...and here's an unheard of photo of me trying CBC's cherry beer. I think it was a La Chouffe beer.

I LOATHE and DETEST beer.  Watch me drink it and see what true horror and abject disgust looks like (apparently it's hilarious) but CBC insisted I try this and it was pleasant! I even took an extra sip when he went to the loo!

Hope you are having a lovely day!

xx