Will big day fill in bridge origins gap? (From The Northern Echo)

Will big day fill in bridge origins gap?

11:34am Wednesday 17th March 2010 in

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AWEEK on Saturday a rather auspicious train will journey gently down the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

Perhaps rather more gently than usual, in fact.

For it will be the first train to cross the popular railway’s new bridge at Darnholme, between Grosmont and Goathland. In what has been the preserved railway’s biggest civil engineering operation in its 37-year history, the steel-beamed bridge has been installed at a cost of £650,000 to replace its worn-out predecessor, which dated back to the era of the line’s engineer, George Stephenson.

All passengers on that first train, leaving Grosmont at 9am, will receive a souvenir certificate.

Very nice, even if the cost is covered by the extra fiver being charged for the trip – on top of which is a further fiver for those who choose to travel in the plush Great Western Saloon.

Short shuttles to the bridge are also being run. And a book celebrating the whole project will be published shortly.

As the author of the very first official guide to the railway I have a modest interest here.

And I look forward to both the certificate and book identifying the manufacturer of the steel for the new bridge and (possibly different) the beams themselves. Strangely, these key details have been omitted from the extensive publicity so far.

Hopefully, the railway will be able to tell us that Teesside provided the steel and the beams. OK, they hardly amount to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, perhaps Teesside steel’s most prestigious monument. But to have helped keep the Moors Railway in business would be an apt final flourish for a proud industry on the eve of its tragic destruction.

IN a newly-discovered letter, written to a friend, PG Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, describes the media “pandemonium” when he was knighted in 1975. His home on New York’s Long Island became “a seething mass of interviewers and photographers, all half-wits”.

Wodehouse’s full measure of wit is not to be denied. Yet he seemingly lacked the nous, if not the wit, to anticipate the horrified reaction of fellow Britons to a series of broadcasts he made to Britain from German-occupied France during the Second World War.

Harmless in themselves, they were viewed as collaborations with the enemy. Wodehouse insisted he had simply been naive in making them. Some wit there, Jeeves, what?

FROM a dead writer to a living one – albeit harbouring thoughts of death. A new poetry collection by Roger McGough, That Awkward Age, reached me this week. A review will appear in due course. But McGough is too good to keep until then. A poem entitled I Am Not Sleeping begins: I don’t want any of that ‘We’re gathered here today To celebrate his life, not mourn his passing.’ Three stanzas later it concludes: So get weeping. Fill yourself with dread.

For I am not sleeping. I am dead.

Needed saying, eh? But we probably won’t hear it at funerals.

SO – after more than 50 years in his rock ’n’ roll groove, Sir Cliff Richard is to attempt an album of swing numbers. I trust its title track will be a cover of a great hit for trumpeter Harry James and his charming vocalist, Helen Forrest: I’m Beginning To See The Light.