Birthday Celebrations

Today, the Great Western Railway celebrated the 175th anniversary of the route between Didcot and Oxford.  And yesterday, it was my 66th birthday.  So I asked whether, for my birthday present, we could go to the celebrations.

We took advantage of the occasion to travel to Oxford from Marylebone, a route we had not done before.  It's cheaper than via Paddington, and the train was absolutely rammed!  We did manage to get seats, but many people were not so lucky.  We went on the Underground, changing at Oxford Circus, but the Bakerloo Line was crowded and there was no step-free access at Marylebone.  Still, it didn't really matter.

When we arrived at Oxford, we went out of the station to ask about buying tickets for the 175th anniversary, which the website said could be done at any GWR station.  However, the woman at the information desk had never heard of such a thing, and didn't know what we were talking about!  Fortunately, the staff at the ticket office were better informed and, armed with a ticket, we went out on the platform just in time to see the 175 Luncheon Circular Tour depart. 

Then there was a modern train heading to Paddington

and, a few minutes later, one of the regular shuttles to Didcot.  This stopped at Radley, where we tried in vain to see any trace of the branch line to Abingdon that had been such a feature of my childhood, and at Culham, from which my father had commuted to London every day over 62 years ago!  Then it arrived at Didcot, where we found the entrance to the railway centre was just a few steps from our platform.

Our tickets included entrance to the railway centre, which was good.  First port of call was the café, where we had rather dry coronation chicken sandwiches and incredibly weak coffee, and then I had a
Toblerone ice lolly and the Swan Whisperer had tiffin and his weak coffee.  Then we set out to explore.  There was lots to see, including a museum which also had a 1960s signal display being demonstatrated, locomotives in steam and hauling passengers from one end of the site to the other

to the skeletons of carriages awaiting restoration

(is that Alexei or Sergei in the first picture?).  There were replicas of the original engines and carriages that ran on the broad gauge

And so on.  After a while, we decided we had finished with the site, and caught the next train back to Oxford.  We could, perhaps, have visited a funfair in Appleford or an exhibition at the Old Ticket Office at Culham, or even a fair on the site of the original Oxford station, about a mile from the present one, but there are limits on my energy, so we caught a train back to Oxford, and had a cup of tea in the station buffet there before getting a train back to Marylebone and a no 2 bus home.

Well worth the entry fees!