Thursday 5 May 2011

All aboard for some Swanage steam train action

The Mose and I went down to Dorset for a few days over the Easter break, mainly because I was wetting myself at the prospect of having a little go on the Swanage Steam Railway after they signed themselves up to my Brown Sign Way website.

This railway line wasn't actually one of the many hundreds across the country that were pulled up and abandoned after Dr Richard Beeching overhauled the railway network in the infamous Becching Report of 1963. This report saw the closure of around a third of all railway lines across Britain (luckily for us though many have now been restored and got themselves a brown sign). This line, which runs from Norden (just north of Corfe Castle) down to the beach and Swanage, was closed in 1972 after British Rail deemed the line simply not profitable enough to sustain, which aroused much local consternation and upset, as you can imagine. Just 3 years later though The Swanage Railway Project was set up by a group of dedicated volunteers (God I love them) and the painstaking task of relaying the line and restoring the railway back to it's former glory was begun. It took over 30 years to complete but finally the first passenger service to run from London all the way through to Swanage via Wareham arrived on the 1st of May 2009.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Me talking on BBC Lincolnshire about The Brown Sign Way

I have a permanent Twitter search set for "brown sign" on my TweetDeck that pulls up any tweet with the words "brown" and "sign" in it. So whenever anyone tweets about brown signs I always tweet them back, tell them what I'm doing and point them to my website. The relevant ones are usually people going down the motorway tweeting "OMG I'm so excited! We've just gone past the first brown sign for Alton Towers!" Others have been rants about the council not replacing stolen or defaced brown signs and sometimes it's random directions to places involving brown signs. Most of the time though the search brings up chat about whether American basketball players or rap stars with surnames "Brown" will "sign" to a new team or record label, obviously not very relevant to The Brown Sign Way but it does mean I'm well clued up about Chris Brown at the moment, so if you ever want to know what's going down him then I'm your gal...

Anyway today the "brown sign" search came up with a tweet by BBC Radio Lincolnshire DJ William Wright, his tweet was this "Has seeing a brown sign ever made you visit somewhere you hadn't thought about going? There's a campaign for Lincoln brown signs on A1". I got very very excited and tweeted that chap straight back, telling him about my website and that of course I'm well up for that brown sign campaign. After a few more tweets and some convincing I was interviewed by said DJ on his drive time show talking about the thing I love the very best, The Brown Sign Way.

It is below if you'd like to listen to it, just click the link and when it's loaded in the window skip to 1:43 (1 hour 43 minutes into the show) and then you'll hear me powering on through my terrible cold and sounding like the true south Londoner I am but didn't realise was quite so pronounced in my accent. Enjoy!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00g9ftw

Or the recording here if it's no longer on iPlayer:

Listen!