Vintage

Someone complained that I wasn't posting enough vintage steam railway shots, so I did a search through my chaotic photo stashes and, alas, I came up with nothing.

I did find this fistful of vintage East Anglian scenes though, which I thought were rather cheering (that was a Class 37 at Liverpool Street in the early 1970s, while this is a shiny new Class 101 unit at King's Lynn in the very early 1960s):

Here's a Class 31, the fall-back loco on London-Cambridge-King's Lynn InterCity trains when a 37 or 47 was unavailable:

It's on a diversionary route, from King's Cross rather than Liverpool Street, and that scene was somewhere near Royston. This next Class 31 is firmly on the traditional London-Lynn route, at Littleport, not far from Downham Market:

The 31s lacked the power of the 37s and 47s, and with a heavy rake of 9 Mk2 carriages they always struggled to keep time on this route.

Let's finish with another 101, this time in corporate Rail Blue livery, handling on off-peak Ely-Lynn service.

Railway journeys of this period are indelibly etched into my memory, and the sight of a 101 or a 37 or a Mk2 in InterCity livery never fails to stir a smile.