Cheshire

2007 built oil/chemical tanker Sten Poseidon attended by tug MSC Victory with MSC Viking at the stern is leaving the locks at Eastham on the Manchester Ship Canal bound for Stanlow.

Combined cycle CHP station powering the Castner Kellner chlorine chemical works at Runcorn viewed from the Manchester Ship Canal. This building now seems to be largely disused.

The former warehouse of the Cheshire Lines Committee close to Warrington Central Station still proclaims the names of the constituent companies - Great Northern Railway, Great Central Railway and Midland Railway. The train seen departing on this very wet day was heading for Manchester on a service from Liverpool.

The joys of rail travel in the north. The 10.29 Northern service to Manchester at Poynton on Saturday 19th November. The previous week there was only a three coach train and nobody was able to board here as it was already rammed to overflowing. This time there were six coaches but the rear one was locked out of service due to the platform at Cheadle Hulme being too short to accommodate it. Selective door opening seems to be a mystery to the geniuses runing our railways. The train was so full that I doubt anyone was able to board at Bramhall or Cheadle Hulme. If this was in the sough-east there would be questions asked in the House of Commons, but oop north we are treated as cattle and expected to be grateful to have any trains at all.

Romiley Board Mill recycles waste paper into cardboard products such as cardboard sheets, tubes, coils and edge protection.

In a flurry of flying leaves Network Rail MPV DR 98982 hurries through Middlewood Station on rail jetting duties. Apparently leaves don't fall at weekend as this train does not run on Saturday or Sunday which has been causing significant problems for the services on those days due to serious slipping on parts of the Buxton branch. This resulted in the farcical situation on the morning of Monday 14th November when the leaf buildup on the rails was such that the jetting train slithered to a halt before reaching Middlewood and had to run back to Hazel Grove wrong line. One wonders who is managing this circus?

School architecture of a certain age often has some lovely details, but photographing them can be fraught with danger in these times when using a camera in the vicinity excites suspicion and hostility. Brierley Primary School in Crewe has an array of terracotta ornamentation on the buildings. In addition to the plaques over entrances for boys and girls, the gables have words of encouragement for the pupils. The boys side has 'Obey', 'Hope' and 'Duty', whilst on the girls side the mottos are 'Love', 'Neatness' and 'Order'.

The short boat George was built in 1910 to carry coal for the Wigan Coal & Iron Company. This is now the sole survivor of the transom-stern boats commonly used on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. After it finished working on the coal trade in Lancashire the boat was saved for the Boat Museum at Ellesmere Port where it remains after a major rebuild in 2016. This view shows the transom stern as it was in 2003 in the livery of its original owners.

On the last day of the recent freezing conditions and after five consecutive nights with the temperature -10 or less I was not surprised to find the waterfall in the local woods had frozen along with most of the river. This is fairly unusual for this part of Britain. Next morning saw a significant rise in temperature and this scene was gone.

The Ford Anglia 105E was built from 1959 to 1968 and proved a popular small car in Britain. The Anglia Super 123E with the same body and a 1198 cc engine was in production from 1962 to 1967. We purchased a 123E for £35 in 1980 and had an interesting year of use from it before selling it on for £30. It had a tendency to jump sideways if driven above 50 mph and at one point deposited the fuel tank in the middle of a petrol station! It was painted the same blue seen on this Anglia 105E at Poynton Show.

The Pineapple on Heaton Lane in Stockport was a good honest boozer where you could get a pint of Robinson's beer at a relatively modest price. Sadly, the demand for wet-led pubs has declined disastrously and this one closed its doors in 2020.

Fiddler's Ferry Power Station could burn up to 16,000 tonnes of coal a day and was also capable of co-firing biomass. Opened in 1971, the station had a generating capacity of 1,989 megawatts.

Prince is one of two Royalty Class boats built in 1931 by James Pollock Sons & Co Ltd of Faversham. Kent, for Associated Canal Carriers Ltd. Seen here at Tramway Wharf in Marple on the Peak Forest Canal.

This is the River Class butty Yeo, built by EC Jones & Son of Brentford in 1959 for British Transport Waterways, a division of the British Transport Commission. The River Class boats were a new design of narrowboat, designed to be cheap and simple to construct and to have 20% extra carrying capacity over more traditional boats. They were built of welded steel sections and used blue glass fibre hatch covers instead of cloth covers.

Garden gates at the canal side of the cottages by the junction of the Macclesfield and Peak Forest Canals in Marple.

Tower Road lift bridge, Birkenhead docks. This replaced a Scherzer rolling bridge a few years ago.

The light is fading as 150 137 heads a Buxton train into Hazel Grove station. Since the Blackpool trains were diverted to Manchester Airport there are only a few rush hour electric services using the line from Edgeley Junction to Hazel Grove which is a great waste of the investment that went into installing the catenary and associated infrastructure. This must be something to do with the very wonderful Northern Powerhouse that our esteemed government keeps banging on about. This is the same government that funded the Ordsall curve in Manchester to allow services between Manchester Victoria and Piccadilly stations. They also removed the funds to increase capacity between Deansgate and Piccadilly with the result that the expensive track has exactly no passenger services using it at all. Joined up thinking at its best.

Doorway mosaic at the Puss in Boots pub in Macclesfield.