giner wrote:I know there will be strong, regional, competing variations to the answer, but wasn't that whole Ferme Park/Harringay/Hornsey/Ally Pally area the very best when it came to sheer variety in what the steam era was all about? Oh my, what have we lost? I feel sorry for those too young to have known these scenes.
True words giner and i didn't even see the area in steam days but just caught the tail-end of that area in the late 1960s and early 1970s still basking in the 'afterglow of the steam railway' with stations like HARRINGAY WEST & HORNSEY still looking like they had done 60-70 years earlier (except for the enamel B.R. station signs added) with gas-lighting and still plenty of semaphore signalling from the 8-9 s/boxes in the HARRINGAY WEST/FERME PARK/HORNSEY area .
I am sorry to post that the whole route from KINGS CROSS northwards nowadays is SO BORING like everything else connected with todays modern railways!!.
King's Cross, Finsbury Park, Hornsey, Wood Green.... These were my GN haunts in my youth. All those strange Pacifics with weird names (no, I don't mean the Gresleys, though many of them had the weird names). But on the LNER I must confess to an attraction for Stratford, where I saw my first Departmental locomotive. (It was no 33.)
However, I'm just an intruder here, as my local haunts were elsewhere and LNER locos were visitors via the North London. Way back I posted a longish piece on the forum describing the scene, so I won't repeat it here. It was called "A Place by the Railway" (in the non-LNER rail section), if anyone's interested, but, be warned, it includes locos built at Swindon.
Meanwhile thank goodness some people had a camera at the time.