St. Erth Station And The St. Ives Branch
St. Erth station is the station, where you change for the St. Ives branch.
I think this station is a good example of how we should treat our rural stations.
It was scrupulously clean and has an excellent shop and cafe. I think too, that the bridge is going to be given lifts to improve changes at the station.
The branch itself is one of the most spectacular in the UK, and my train was an immaculate Class 150. I hope that unit is in the queue for the upgrade some of its sisters have received in East Anglia.
The Cornish will certainly look after it.
Around St. Ives
I took these pictures as I walked around St. Ives.
It wasn’t my first visit and C and I had had a brief visit about twenty years ago.
The Tate At St. Ives
The Tate St. Ives is one of those buildings, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, that make me want to get my camera out.
At the Guggenheim, I photographed the building as the light played with the building in the evening sun.
As these pictures show, the Tate all about the sea.
The Tate is a building totally suited to its surroundings.
Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden
I like sculpture and I spent a pleasant half-an-hour in the garden of the Babara Hepworth Musem in the rain.
We need to get more of our great sculptures out of the sterile museums and into the open air.
I know there’s a security problem with bronzes, but if we choose the locations carefully, we should be able to minimise the theft.
The Best Meal I’ve Ever Had On A Scheduled Train
I’ve eaten on many trains and used to regularly enjoy breakfast on Ipswich to London in the past, when they had a dining car. In some ways the most memorable was a return from Teeside to London behind a Class 55, where the driver showed what a Deltic could do.
I’ve also travelled with C on the Eastern and Oriental Express.
But no meal on a train could compare with the one I ate going from Paddington to St. Ives in one of First Great Western’s InterCity 125s. They call it Pullman Fine Dining.
I had found out that they were serving lunch on the 11:30 from Paddington, so I booked myself on that train. There was a bit of a mix-up between the train times and the web site, but as you can see, I got my high-class lunch.
As a coeliac, what really impressed me was the professional way they dealt with allergies. In fact, if anybody wants to open a restaurant, they could do no better than copy the openness.
The two courses I ate were excellent, as was the service.
I do hope that this form of catering leads to similar offerings on other lines.
There was only two things wrong with the meal.
I had to eat it by myself and it would have been so much better with a travelling companion.
The other was that First Great Western don’t have a card, which says when this service is offered. I’m off to Cardiff on Tuesday, so could I get lunch on the way down?
The Anonymous Widower 