The road trip was in May, it's taken me until July to sort through all the video footage & post them up, so what else has been happening in the blattersphere?
Well my lovely girlfriend & I had a very good week's holiday in Norfolk. Perhaps not your first though for a holiday destination, but we rented a small cottagey thing & packed the week full of interesting places.
On the way we called into Old Buckenden Airfield where there is a memorial / museum to the USAAF aircrew who operated B24 Liberators from there in WWII, by co-incidence they had a Piper Cup owner's club meet on, so that was good.
On the second day we went to the Norfolk & Suffolk Aviation Museum, it's small, but like a lot of small museums it packed in a lot of things & some quite unexpected interesting things too. This for example is the front end of a Boulton Paul Overstrand - the RAF's first bomber with an enclosed cockpit & turrets, they only made enough for one squadron because it was one of the last biplanes & the times they were a changing.
Also, this >
That's a Merlin engine from a crashed aircraft, you're looking at the bottom of the engine as it lies on it's side. The bent thing at the bottom is the crankshaft, the first piston is still in it's bore liner (squashed flat) at the top.
As a bonus they had a small car show in the grounds that day.
The day after that was a trip to Banham Zoo, so I won't trouble you with that - it was a very nice zoo, but not the sort of thing I write about here - no engines.
Tuesday was Bressingham Gardens & Steam Museum, obviously the gardens fall into the same category as the zoo, though they were very nice even for a non-gardener like me. But the steam side of it was good, as we arrived there were a couple of volunteers tending to a traction engine, so we took photos & asked questions, then wandered into the sheds where there were engines undergoing maintenance.
In the second shed though were lots of engines & the closest one made my girlfriend stop dead & say "no, that can't be", but it was - a big old main line engine called "Black Prince" & one of her favourites was not only there, but with a ladder so visitors could get up onto the foot plate - which we did.
Next was another shed with the high street of Warmington-on-Sea from Dad's Army with several of the original vehicles parked up including Jones' butchers van. once again we arrived as it opened & left just after it closed.
Wednesday & the Forncett industrial Steam Museum, we arrived & a guy said "I'm doing a tour in ten minutes, would you like to be on it?" silly question! so we were guided round the museum's fifteen or so beautiful old steam engines which they do steam up once a month, but on this trip we couldn't fit a steaming day in. All the engines run & all are maintained in fantastic condition - in a shed, up a country lane, in a hamlet that no-ones heard of, in deepest Norfolk.
The guy that started it was given an old engine in his teens & it took over his life & his garden. He has one of the engines that raised Tower Bridge & an engine that pumped water to the homes in Dover, so they have had to be dismantled, lifted out of their setting, moved to Norfolk, new settings made, the engines fitted, re-built & restored & then a building built around them! A mammoth operation for a tiny group of volunteers, the pumping engine is three storeys tall!
The astonishing thing about them is the details, they were just products build to do a job, but every little detail is beautifully finished, all the castings are superb, all the engraved brass plates are perfect, the rods & linkages are all pieces of art in their own right, A couple of the engines had flywheels 12ft in diameter, sand cast in two pieces, so you make a wooden 1/2 wheel, bury it in casting sand, remove the wood & pour molten iron in. BUT - you have to allow for thermal contraction as the iron cools, so the wooden master has to be bigger than the finished part,
there can't be any cracks as it cools, so all the shapes need to blend smoothly & the two 1/2 wheels have to match perfectly AND - you have to calculate all that correctly with a slide rule.
We NEED to go back & see this all in steam, there are videos on the web site. But the most amazing part of this whole wonderful thing? It's FREE to get in! They do ask for donations, but there is no entry fee.
Thursday was going to be a rest day, but instead we went to the East Anglia Transport Museum where they have trams, trolley busses & a narrow gauge train to ride on as well as a few sheds full of exhibits. The site is really nicely laid out like a cobbled high street with the trams & trolley bus rumbling around, taking people for rides. A lot of the trams were beautiful, proper art deco both inside & out, so we had another full gates open to gates close sort of day.
But the Friday was the reason we were here at all, my present to my girlfriend at Christmas had been a tank driving experience at the Norfolk Tank Museum.
There are many "tank driving" experiences, a lot are combined with some other armyish activity like "an SAS patrol" or car crushing, but this one appealed because it was held on days when the museum was closed, giving "behind the scenes" access which I knew my girlfriend would like because of the photo opportunities. We were due to arrive at 2:00 & it was supposed to last about two hours, so we went to a local airfield & had a cooked breakfast watching the aeroplanes, they also were having a car show & fly in later so we thought we'd call in on the way home.
On arrival the owner said "we have to move the WWI tank to the bottom field, would you like a ride?" Oh yes we would! It's a replica & the story of it's making can be seen in a Channel 4 programme called "Guy Martin's WWI Tank".
Having clambered in through the hatches you can just see are open in the tank side, we sat on a "shelf" beside the two Lewis guns (this is a "female" tank, so has machine guns), there were five other people in there, two at the front driving, two at the back working the gears & another "gunner" opposite us on the other side of the engine - which started with an absolute cacophony, it's just in a steel box inside a bigger steel box, so the noise & heat are incredible - then the drivers start SHOUTING which gear they want back to the gearsmen & the fumes are making our eyes water & I realised it was pretty hellish for the tank crews even before people started shooting! So we set off, at one point one of the Lewis guns swung round & hit my girlfriend on the head, she didn't mind - being hit by a Lewis gun in a WWI tank is a
privilege.The man then told us the history of the tank & showed us round the museum, climbing up on the tanks to see inside, then he took us round the armoury, telling us the story of the guns & letting us handle them. My girlfriend said "that's a Martini-Henry rifle, "Zulu" is one of my favourite films" the man took it down, handed it to her & said "We've researched the serial number of this gun - we believe it was used at Rork's Drift".
After that it was on to the driving, starting with a Haaglund BV206.
There was a demonstration lap when the man said interesting things, like "it has a 2.8 Cologne V6 like in a Capri" & "it's amphibious, I've driven it across a pond" Then it was my girlfriend's turn, it took some getting used to, but she was very good (if a little shreiky) & she did actually drive it over several humps like the picture. one second the windscreen was entirely full of sky, the next it was completely full of tracked mud, brilliant.
Then we moved on to the point of the exercise, driving the tank (actually a Saladin 6x6 armoured car) as other museum people drove Chieftain tanks around us. But there was a problem.
Having gamely clambered up onto the rear deck, further up onto the turret, then got in through a hatch & slithered down into the driver's seat, she found she could either reach the pedals or see out through that hole in the front, but not both at the same time. various things were tried to no avail, so in the end I drove it which was good, but not what I'd wanted. Fortunately the rest of the day was sufficiently "EPIC" & she was quite happy standing in the turret being driven around. By the time we left it was 7:30 & far too late to call in at the aerodrome, especially as we'd had no lunch, as we were expecting to be home by 5:00.
And so it was the final day, but we wouldn't just be going home, oh no! we were extracting the absolute
maximum juice from our little holiday by calling in for a tour of Historic Team Lotus Racing" at Hethel.
This started with a chat from a long standing employee, who then too us round the workshops, telling stories & the history of the cars as we passed them, the upstairs is a "museum" with complete cars, some owned by Lotus, some not.
After that we went home.
It was brilliant, when I'd done the planning, I started with the tank museum & then looked at what else was interesting in the same area, when we booked the cottage, it was almost as expensive to book a few days as it was a week, so we looked for more things to do & we found REALLY interesting things, very close by. The tank, industrial steam, zoo & gardens were all less than 15 miles. But the thing that amazed me was that those things all started because a chap had a house with some land & a hobby which grew into an obsession, which became a museum / attraction.
What a brilliant week.
