(Day) Return to Carlisle

We returned to Carlisle this summer, just for a day trip. We were meant to go on an Excursion, but West Coast Railways couldn't organise their train set and it got cancelled. So we travelled by Northern Rail instead. Well, the trains are old enough to also count as 'heritage'...

To be fair, class 158's aren't too bad, and they've been refurbished to a high standard. There was even a trolley service!  Shame it ran slow and late, but hey, that's the Settle Carlisle line. Looks pretty, but not run terribly well. How you can run late on a double-tracked main line when there's no other trains using it...

Enough moaning. Anyway, this was a bit of a nostalgia trip for us, as we met in Carlisle whilst on the Photography course at what was then the Cumbria Institute of the Arts, now a small arts campus of the Uni of Cumbria. The above pic is a revisit of one of Amy's early, but very large, projects, documenting the surviving Emergency Water Supply signs (World War 2 vintage) scattered around the city.

We did the Cathedral as well, and more on that in a seperate post.

We didn't exactly do the tourist thing; our interest in Carlisle when we lived there was always taking random pics of the overlooked bits. Peer closely enough at the above, for example, and there's another ghost sign, from when this was an office for the Caledonian Railway.

And the above; this was Woolworths when we lived there. Look at the bonkers patchwork of bricks!

Another ghost sign. Some more pics from Carlisle to follow.