Tag Archives: travel

IWM Duxford

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My wife is a star – well that, or she is a masochist.  Our trip to the UK was in three phases.  We spend the first phase visiting family.  The second phase was my visit to RIAT for a few days while she did things in London and around the south coast.  The last phase was our time to tour around East Anglia and relax a little.  Our last full day had us up near Cambridge.  She suggested I might want to visit the Imperial War Museum aviation collection at Duxford.  Since I had taken a chunk of the vacation to do aviation things, I was not going to push anything aviation related for the rest of the trip but she was quite happy to do this.  What a star!

I haven’t been to Duxford for ages so I was interested to see how things had changed.  What was once called the Superhangar had been rebuilt and had lots of interesting stuff inside.  The American Forces section was there last time I went and hadn’t changed a lot.  Some of the large airliner stuff outside was familiar but other bits were either new or something I didn’t recall from previous visits.  It is a very extensive collection and well worth a visit.  I was really pleased to check it out.

I will give a few of the exhibits their own posts but this is a bit of a summary post.  Below is a gallery of some of the shots I took as we wandered around.

RNLI Boathouse at Bembridge

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I have hinted in a previous post that some lifeboat posts were coming, and this is the first.  We visited Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight, as part of our trip.  Bembridge has had a lifeboat station since the 1800s.  For those not from the UK, the rescue at sea system in the UK might come as a bit of a surprise.  The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is a charity that provides rescue at sea.  It is not a government run program and is entirely based on charitable donations.  Hard for most visitors to understand but it runs very well.  Aside from the engineer that maintains the boat, all of the crews are volunteers.  They have other jobs and come to crew the boat when summoned.

We have had family in Bembridge for generations, so I have been going there all of my life.  For most of that time, the lifeboat was kept in a boathouse at the end of a pier at Lane End from where it would be launched down a slipway.  I shot a launch from the old boathouse many years ago and that appeared in this post I wrote a while after that.  That pier and boathouse had reached the end of its life so was demolished and a new pier built to accommodate the next generation of boat.  I had been to look at this boathouse as I wrote about here but had not been in the house and not seen a launch.

I looked on the website for the station when I woke up one morning during our stay and was surprised to discover that they were planning on launching not once, but twice that day.  The first launch was not that far off so I jumped out of bed and got ready to head down.

The boathouse was already open when I got there.  The crew explained that they were planning on switching boats out and that they were launching their boat to take it to Cowes where they would pick up a spare (or relief) boat and bring it back.  They would then do another launch that evening.  They were ready to go but a school party was coming to witness the launch, so they were waiting for them.  As soon as they arrived (late), everything was ready to go.

These are the shots from looking around the boathouse prior to the launch.  The launch itself will follow in another post!

Bristow’s Coastguard AW189

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While walking along the waterfront at East Cowes, I heard the noise of an approaching helicopter.  As it got closer, it turned out to be a Coastguard AW189.  I hoped it would come closer and it obliged by flying almost directly over us.  What I didn’t know was that another of the fleet would be at RIAT when I was there a few days later so I was going to get a closer look than this.  Stay tuned for that!

Romanian LanceRs

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RIAT proved to be a lot of fun with such a variety of types to see.  The shooting conditions were less than ideal but that shouldn’t take away from what was there and the effort that went in to organizing it all – I’m looking at you Tom if you are reading this.  Your team did a great job.  One of the stars of the show was actually a rather aged type.  Romania brought a pair of MiG-21 LanceR jets.  The last time I shot an active MiG-21 was at Rockford many years ago and that was privately owned.  These were very definitely active.

Their arrival on the Thursday certainly got everyone excited and the display itself was great.  The jet is from an era when the current levels of maneuverability had not been achieved but the jet can still put on quite a show.  The speed is something to behold, particularly on final approach when it fairly screams in to land.  I got to shoot it from a couple of locations including being at the departure end on the Sunday of the show and getting slightly closer to the jet as it taxied out.  I understand that they will disappear before too long to be replaced with something more generic – F-16s I think – so it was time to enjoy something old school for perhaps the last time.

Posts in the Water – Are They for the Carrier?

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I have made countless trips between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight over the course of my life.  Things change but most of the landmarks are remarkably consistent.  I was therefore quite surprised to see some very large posts that had appeared in the approaches to Portsmouth Harbour.  I knew that there had been dredging work undertaken to allow the new carriers (see this post) to enter the naval base.  I suspected that these new large posts might be connected with the same project.  Sure enough, some research after our returned confirmed that navigation lights have been installed to allow the carriers to navigate their way in.  These light are mounted on top of large posts sunk into the seabed.  They aren’t the most attractive things but I guess they do the job.

Red Kestrel

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The Red Funnel ferries have made appearances on the blog after previous UK trips including this one here.  While we were on the seafront at Cowes, we saw one of the ferries coming in but it looked pretty odd.  It actually looked a lot like the old style of ferries from my youngest days.  There was little upper superstructure and it looked like it was designed for trucks only.  The name was Red Kestrel so a quick google confirmed that this is exactly what it is.  By taking freight traffic, it leaves more space on the main ferries for the car traffic.  Apparently, it has space for about 12 passengers so I guess it is not well appointed!

South Coast Trains

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There are a few readers of the blog that like trains so this is a quick view of some UK passenger trains.  We stayed in Chichester for a while and were very close to the station.  We had to walk past it in to the town.  There were tons of trains running along this coast route so I saw several as we were finding out where things were.  Here are two of the trains.  They are both EMUs, one of which is relatively recent while the other is a pretty old vintage of train that I didn’t even realize operated in this part of the world.

HMS Queen Elizabeth

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One leg of our trip to the UK included a ferry to the Isle of Wight.  We took the ferry from Portsmouth and, as we drove in to town, I thought I could see the twin islands of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first of the pair of new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy.  Sure enough, when we pulled out of Gunwharf on the ferry, we could see the carrier moored in the naval base.  A rear view doesn’t give to much impression of the ship but she is clearly pretty large.  At about 65,000 tons, she is over three times the displacement of the previous RN carriers.

Precursor to the Lifeboat Posts

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There are going to be some lifeboat posts coming up in the coming weeks.  We ended up seeing quite a bit of the RNLI’s work while we were there.  I shall have more detailed posts but these shots are just a warm up act for the posts to come.  I do like the RNLI and they certainly entertained me on this trip!

Power for a Factory

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The Dearborn factory required a large power generation facility and, in days gone by, this was provided by a large steam engine driving generators.  This machine is now nicely preserved.  The scale of it is a bit hard to represent.  The cylinders are huge and the controls are substantial.  You can climb up on top of the whole thing to see how it went together.  Surprisingly, this is not a place that was getting too many visitors which meant I was able to nose around in relative peace.  It is hard to imagine what it would have been like when this enormous piece of engineering was in use and was generating the power for the plant.  Now it is idle but it still looks imposing.