LocomotivesUK is SSL Again

You may have noticed a slight change to the LocomotivesUK Railblog in that it has started flipping to being a sub-domain of one of my other domain names.

This has been done to help save spending £125 a year on having more than 2 SSL Certificates available on my hosting package, which I have to split between 15 – 20 domain names.

The move should help keep the site safer, keep Google happy, speed things up as this AlltheInterweb domain is also wired-up to Cloudflare CDN and stop your web browser making false claims that this website might not be safe just because it was using ye olde fashioned http instead of https like you see now.

Volunteers Needed for Miniature Railway

Like many organisations involved in heritage railways, the Volunteer team at the National Railway Museum in York are looking for people to help run things.

On this occasion they require people to help with their 7 1/4-inch Gauge Miniature Railway.


Click Here for More Details
Applications being taken until 3rd October 2022
Continue reading “Volunteers Needed for Miniature Railway”

DriveTribe Visits the Talyllyn Railway

Interesting little something I found on YouTube that may of interest to rail enthusiasts that aren’t necessarily big YouTube enthusiasts or “car guys”.

Mike from the “DriveTribe” car channel operated by Clarkson, Hammond and May formerly of Top Gear fame (and now hosts of The Grand Tour on Amazon Prime) presenting a video from the Talyllyn Steam Railway, and uploaded to the “What Next?” channel on YouTube (that previously used to be the “FoodTribe” offshoot of DriveTribe).

Click Here to watch it directly on YouTube if you’ve got a spare 17minutes Continue reading “DriveTribe Visits the Talyllyn Railway”

Class 55 Deltic at Whitby Station 2012 – Panoramic Pic

I got a number of opportunities to photograph one of my favourite locomotives types in 2012, the Class 55 Deltic (most of the footage being lost to a HDD failure a few summers later).

Included was an attempt at using the panoramic mode on my best digital compact, and now I’ve got a new plugin here on the blog for displaying panoramic shots thought I’d take the opportunity to test it out with a picture recovered from a now defunct extra webhosting package I had for one of my previous website projects. Continue reading “Class 55 Deltic at Whitby Station 2012 – Panoramic Pic”

Making LocomotivesUK Greater on Instagram

The last few years have made it rather awkward to be able to get around and create video content for this website’s channels on well known popular video sharing websites.

First my own car had issues with it’s MOT in 2019 (and I still haven’t been able to afford to fix the thing), then after about 15-months of having to leg it everywhere again finally taking charge of my Dad’s car to get around, only to still not being able to get around much ‘cos of the dratted freak-out over the virus. Continue reading “Making LocomotivesUK Greater on Instagram”

Forums Clean-up

Efforts to clean the forums of several months worth of spam are on-going in an effort to make the damn place usable again for pukka users.

I’m slowly getting there via a combination of shunting the cr*p into a hidden section of the forums + deleting it after reporting the morons via StopForumSpam.

Feel free to use the forums for their intended purpose of talking about trains, and perhaps Introduce Yourself.

Talk About Trains

Back in the early days of me using the internet. and becoming a born again railway enthusiast back around 2002 one of the first places I cut my teeth talking online about trains was on Yahoo Groups.

Now in the continuing saga of the managed decline of Yahoo, the groups on there are apparently going to be totally binned.

If you’re looking for somewhere else to talk about locomotives and railway related stuff on the interweb, don’t forget we have a messageboard forum attached to the blog where you can talk about this stuff instead, as well as a comments box below each article on the blog. Continue reading “Talk About Trains”

Track Tamper in Whitby Sidings

Spotted this around 4:40pm Monday (2/March/2020) while I was wandering into town….

I didn’t have my good cameras with me at the time, so I had to make do with my knackered old iPhone 3GS to bodge these few shots in the fading light.

Website Now Upgraded to SSL

Today I’ve made a brief upgrade to the website so that it runs over SSL with an https:// at the start of the domain instead of the traditional less secure http:// version.

In theory this should make the site more secure, run faster + keep google happy.

It’s also now required to have an https:// at the start of the url for certain well known popular social media websites to allow your website to use their website for log-in & registration, such as Facebook Connect and similar website features.


UPDATE: 4th October 2021

The site has now been downgraded from using SSL as I needed the certificate for something else, and it wasn’t making that much difference to securing the site anyway from spammers.

It will be upgraded again at a later date when I’m better able to afford the £100 a year the webhosts charge for having more than the 2 included SSL certificates on the package when running more than 1 website on it.

LNER Class A4 4498 (60007) Sir Nigel Gresley Steam Locomotive Video Compilation

This latest addition to the LocomotivesUK Youtube Channel features all the footage I managed to piece together of LNER A4 60007 (4498) Sir Nigel Gresley over a period of years from 2002 until 2015.

There was one clip missing, likely lost in the Seagate hard drive failure, but it wasn’t all that brilliant to begin with. One evening in April/May 2008 I caught a glimpse of it doing a trial run to Whitby and back prior to the runs featured in this video which did survive.

The opening 3 still images were taken at Pickering Station on 14th April 2015, a couple of months before that Seagate Hard Drive problem I keep mentioning. Thankfully I was able to recover them from my personal Facebook albums. Continue reading “LNER Class A4 4498 (60007) Sir Nigel Gresley Steam Locomotive Video Compilation”