Tour of Britain Stage 6 Roll Out in Barrow

Tour of Britain Posters

Sweeping the streets on Thursday getting ready for the Tour of Britain.

The statue in Schneider Square has been decorated in readiness.

Henry Schneider dressed in green. Is he impressed?

Friday arrives and this police man was kept busy directing three lanes of traffic,  his piercing whistle was almost as loud as his shout at dozing motorists to get them moving.  Nearly time for him to move off as the helicopter appears overhead and the other bike marshals power down Roose Road.

  Here comes the main event.

Katusha Alpecin, Dimension Data and Direct Energie

This was the point I realised I hadn't put a sports mode on my camera - so slow, ergh, unlike the whizz of racing bikes heading for the coast road and the racing.

Direct Energie and the other team cars roll on past and we move off the windy corner. 

Sping into Autumn

 Cherry Blossom in May

and

its berries in October, both bring delight under sparkling blue skies.

X Sign

An X in the sky meant when I took this photo one of ABC Wednesday's tricky letters was sorted.  The crossing here is of road, rail and cycle path and the only steam train ever seen is the one painted on the sign as the line is for freight

to the docks. I didn't take any photos of the railway lines because I thought I had some already, which was true, but they are inaccessible at the moment and in the depths of my very poorly old laptop although I do have my memory cards,  which I haven't labeled, xxxx!  

International Nuclear Services Terminal

The rail tracks can just be seen in this photo.  We have had some strange weather patterns this year and the day in May these photos were taken was no exception, sultry, with complete hazy cloud cover,

the lines between sky and water only distinguished by their texture.  The ship is the Oceanic Pintail which makes it sound quite benign but in actual fact it is a carrier of high level radioactive waste so you could say it is x rated.  On its journeys around the world they will turn off the AIS (Automatic Identification System) and if returning via the Suez Canal the canal cameras will be turned off to keep secret its course. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative means that the Plutonium it carries will end up somewhere near the Savannah River in the US. 

'Normal' nuclear waste will trundle up and down the coast to and from the port but on the occasions more exotic nuclear materials are transported then the level of police buzzing up and down the road is usually a pointer to transportation of something potentially more dangerous.   

but not on a quiet November day when the even the rails on this coastal railway seemed autumnal.  

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at X here  

    

Flags Flying

The Strawberry

The football calm before the storm?

Geese

My computer is a bit glitchy today so I turn quickly to some recent photographs of geese.  Here are a pair of greylag (ancestors to most domestic geese) surveying their domain. 

Meanwhile the Canada Geese are prowling along the expanding edge of the lake

while keeping an eye out for the local humans who often appear with some easy eating.  I think they might be disappointed 

because nobody will be sitting on this green lakeside seat.  Its rather ironic that boating on the park lake was cancelled in the summer

 and the boathouse closed because of low water levels however in the springtime

 I was amused at this group of five children on a pedalo who were not shelling out for two boats when they could cram onto one.   No need to guess where the weight is concentrated and the life jackets in the back might come in handy.  

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at the letter G here

j

Water

We have had a lot of water recently weeks and weeks of rain  as the storms come in wave upon wave from the Atlantic but here on the sunny May days of my photographs there is not a drop is in the air.  Silently and unseen an underground water supply makes its way to the taps of the valley.  Nature gave us a dryish summer and the boating house of the local park lake closed up because water levels were too low but they were high enough for the resident water fowl. 

The Goose family were too quick for me, taking to the water as I approached.  I often saw this pair in May always attentive to their lone chick, the other eggs cannot have hatched and probably fallen victim to a predator, I suspect the local herring gulls who are always after an easy meal.  Inland the gulls are nowhere to be seen and in a water fountain

this duck is showing off  its waterproof feather as it made a slow turn changing direction under the rhododendron trees

the sunlight dazzlingoff the droplets. 

Russell Square fountain, London

Was this little boy about to test the waterproof nature of his clothing (nil) or skin (good)?  Water fountains are an irresistable attraction with their frothing water but I think he is undecided and one small step might be enough. It was a rather chilly day, as you can see from the number of people wearing jackets and scarves.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at W here   

 

Reduce Refuse

A small group takes refuge from the summer sun under a tree and lick their cooling ice cream cornets, the ultimate in litter free treats.  The council worker alights from a refuse truck on his journey past York Minster (just visible on the left) and the Church of St Michael le Belfrey to check the litter bins in an area where happily  not a scrap of rubbish can be seen.

To continue the theme nearer to my home here is a mural with a message as imagined by one of the local schools, Greengate Infants and Junior School -  'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle', a good motto to promote. The school formed a partnership with the construction company building a care home for older people on the same street and there are a number of murals around the building on different subjects painted on the site fencing.  Who knows the other ones might come in handy for another letter of ABC Wednesday!

Lastly we take a trip to a recycling area taken a few days after last Christmas when the bottle banks were already full and the excess was starting to line up in front.  A journey to the bottle bank has almost become part of the Christmas tradition and by the time the recycling guys go back to work there will certainly be a whole lot more as the population takes the message "eat, drink and be merry" to heart.  

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at R here 

Needle Navigation

Known locally as simply 'The Needle' this is the only survivor of 13 navigation beacons build in the 19th Century (c1875) to lead ships in the port of Barrow in Furness. The brickwork is red and yellow but the June flowers are outdoing the structure for yellowness.  Its official title is Leading Light Number 4 and the  66 feet (20m) needle rises on the foreshore at Rampside.  Originally one of the other towers would have been nearby on the Island of Foulney, a low lying shingle spit home to nesting birds which can be walked to at low tide

on an old shingle and rock causeway

and is somewhere in the middle distance to the left of the Needle in this photograph. Piel Island and its castle can be glimpsed on the horizon to the right.  What a pity there is no time machine to journey back in time and see the glow of 13 beacons shining out in a dark 19th Century sky warning and guiding ships as they thread their way through channels, past sandbanks, islands and shingle spits safely into port.

An entry for ABCWednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at N here

  

Little Lines

Little trains on little lines and running today, well actually Sunday afternoons from March to October in Barrow Park.

The signals up, the engine's steaming and a wave from the 'station'

The little lines run in a quarter mile circuit on an elevated 3.5 and 5" gauge track and various model locomotives pull the 'carriages'.

Here is one of the diesels running past the old Furness Railway Signal Box (Devonshire Road) which provides water for the steam engines

and copious cups of tea for the member of the Furness Model Railway volunteers.  I'm not sure how long this little railway has been running in the park but the society itself was formed in 1956 and in the 1960s the Devonshire Road Signal Box was still located on the old railway line on the Low Road.

Photo from: http://www.southlakes-uk.co.uk/userrequested.html

.

Returning to the present here is one of the little trains completing its circuit.

Of course every railway has an engineering shed and the Furness Model Railway is no exception

On a beautifully warm September afternoon the best place to tinker with the rolling stock

is under clear sunny skies

Walking through Barrow Park today all was quiet, the signal was at stop,  the signal box locked up (I'm cheating here as I took this photo back in March), the lines were empty but nearby there was still a set hobbyists in place but in this case, model ships rather than trains, and putting their  

sailing ships through their paces round the buoys of the park lake for Tuesday is their day.

 

 

 An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at L here 

Buccleuch Dock

Living on a peninsula surrounded by sea there is usually a breeze or wind  coming from some direction of the compass. Unusually the photograph shows a sultry still day on the 1st July when it was just like walking into an overheated room, the cloud strata adding to the effect. This is Buccleuch Dock which is part of a small dock complex.  Another exceptional aspect is that there was not one ship or boat in sight, although there was one behind me. For the past ten years you could guarantee at least one in the dock

which was the Princess Selandia, once a nightclub and restaurant until it closed in 2010 due to a fire, since then it has been gently rusting by the dockside. 

"Princess Selandia, Barrow Quay" by martinmillar6 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/8672968@N02/682769103/. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Here it is in lit up for the revellers in 2007 when you could dance the night away on the freight deck which had been converted into "The Blue Lagoon"  After the fire this Danish passenger vessel's next destination had been due to be part of a dockland attraction at Korsør but the scheme collapsed.  The project has now been revived and on 14th July she set off for Danish shores to be a museum.  Once owned by the Danish State Railroad I believe she is the last ship of its type.  I wonder if she will be promoted and go back to her old name of Queen Ingrid?   You can see there is a walkway next to the ship which can be accessed by a gate from the supermarket car park and I like to keep an eye and a camera ready for any visiting ships as I load my shopping into the car boot.  Today the gate was locked so I was thwarted in having a nosey at a Swedish yacht on the other side.  The pathway can be accessed further down but I'm temporarily not very mobile at the moment so I gave it a miss,

although once you are on the pathway there are plenty of seats.  This photo of  Buccleuch Dock is with a ripple of a slight breeze but as you can see I can never resist a reflection.  The dock opened in 1873 and is named after one of the original investors of the port and docks.  The picture was taken in late afternoon light, November 2012, and in the distance can be seen three corvettes which also, like the Princess Selandia,  became local landmarks after the Brunei Navy refused to take delivery of them. The dispute eventually went to arbitration in 2007 and BAE Systems won the case, resulting in Brunei eventually finding another buyer for them in 2012, the Indonesian Navy.   I've been trying to remember when they eventually sailed away

 and think it must have been last year as I took this photo in July 2013 plus some of these corvettes were involved in the search for the Indonesia Air Asia plane which went missing at sea.

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at B here