My week “off” has turned out much as I feared, if not worse. In a mocking echo of the sixties, when the motor car ran rampant and almost killed off the railways, there is not a day this week when I am not taking a (broken) car to a garage or fetching a (still broken) one back, leaving little time for railway construction. The eldest JRA and I have, however, been on a prototype train every day as a consequence. But as these were all soulless Arriva DMUs, they haven’t been much compensation. (There are rumours of a more enchanting trip out on Friday…)

Today we found a spare hour after returning from the Big City Motor Dealers (home of the Whopping Big Service Bill) and doing our chores to get into the garden and lay the second curve. This one enters the previously virgin territory of the lawn; there is a now a dirty great trench making its way across the turf. I think we may have to introduce a shallow gradient, as the trackbed is presently in a cutting to stay on the level, which isn’t very appealing and, more importantly, is bound to cause the youngest JRA to take a tumble.

Naturally, it started spotting with rain shortly after we stepped outside, but we ignored it long enough to get filthy-dirty. Nothing must stop the railway! (Except teatime. And the laundry. And broken cars. And the rest of life.)

Here’s a song to be going on with, which I’m posting here for no better reason than that I like it and it’s tangentially about railways. This is Trains by Porcupine Tree (2.8MB, MP3). It’s only 64Kbps quality, so if you want high fidelity, you’ll have to download it from iTunes or, better yet, buy the In Absentia album. I particularly like it when the main riff comes crashing back in after the folky interlude, heralding a tour-de-force outro from Gavin Harrison on drums.

“A sixty ton angel falls to the earth,
A pile of old metal, a radiant blur…