A Halloween Surprise

 Last month, one of our human guardians' very kind friends sent us some free tickets for the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway, but they had to be used before the end of October.  Once we got back from our boat trip, that didn't leave very much time but we decided to go on the last day of the month and Polar booked us into B&B at a nice pub so we wouldn't have a long, dark drive home afterwards.

Polar drove us down and we got to Toddington just in time for the first steam train of the day!  We were all so excited to see it - we love steam engines!

Polar and Grizzly found seats in the buffet and got themselves cups of tea to enjoy with their sandwiches on a nice long journey up to Broadway, the newest station.  We had a marvellous view of the countryside from our Bear Bag, as Polar put it on the table.

Soon we arrived at Broadway, which is quite a new station although there was an old station here when the line was still part of the main network and ran all the way from Bristol and Cheltenham to Honeybourne, Stratford and Birmingham.  You would never think this was a newly-built station, would you?

This is the end of the line for now, so the locomotive had to run round the train, which is always a good time to get photographs.  We looked after our table while Polar went out with her camera and Grizzly bought us some more tea.

Then we set off through lovely countryside on the longest part of our journey all the way to Cheltenham.  There are several little stations on the way including one that the train doesn't stop at.

Gotherington station is privately-owned and is someone's house now, but it still has lots of original features on the platform, like advertising signs and fire buckets, and a narrow-gauge railway in their garden!

The end of the line is now at Cheltenham Racecourse.  There was no horse-racing that day, so it was very quiet there.  Polar took some more photos of the loco running round and we watched from the window.

When we set off back to towards Toddington, we noticed the sky had turned rather stormy.  It was also rather windy, though we were nice a snug in our train.  We were having so much fun that we asked Grizzly if we could go all the way to Broadway again, and he agreed.

One of the things Polar pointed out to us was the ridges in many of the fields, which she explained went back to medieval times, when people farmed individual strips of land in large, communal fields before landowners "enclosed" it with hedgerows and fences.

When we came back to Toddington, we had a little look at the loco yard, where there were some old diesels and waggons.  We weren't able to go inside to see any of the other steam engines but maybe we'll visit again one day.

Before we left, we saw the diesel unit that was running as the other service that day.  It was very neat and, if it hadn't been the very last train of the day and not going any further, we might have enjoyed a little ride on it, so maybe we'll do that another day.

When we got to our B&B pub, there were candles everywhere.  We thought it was for Halloween but it wasn't - there was a power-cut as the stormy weather had brought down a power line!  Polar and Grizzly thought about going home, but decided to wait and see what would happen and luckily the power did come on again, though too late for a proper Sunday dinner.  But we all slept well and had a nice big breakfast in the morning, ready for another adventure which I will tell you about in my next post.