Trains in the UK: Our tour begins

LONDON — Greetings from St. Pancras station in London — and I do mean that literally, since our hotel is in the station.]

Tonight was the official start of the Trains/Special Interest Tours UK steam tour, with the group assembling for introductions and dinner. Tomorrow, there’s a bus tour of London (which I may miss; more on that momentarily) and a visit to the Mail Rail and Postal Museum.

This is going to be a shorter entry than I had planned, for two reasons: I’m having issues with extremely slow WiFI here (maybe just the luck of the draw with room location), and I have managed to catch a monumental cold. (I may be nipping off to Boots — the Walgreens of the UK — for something for my throat in a few minutes.)

But I did want to provide at least a quick update of what I’ve been up to since my last post. After two essentially rail-free days of soccer (West Ham 1, Crystal Palace 2 at the London Stadium), and museum visits, Monday was entirely rail-oriented, touring the dispatching center and maintenance facility for the Elizabeth Line, the rail line that has, by all accounts, remade London transit. The more I see and learn about this operation, the more impressed I am, and I look forward to telling you all about it in a future Trains feature. Tomorrow, I’ll be interviewing the line’s executive director — the reason I may miss that bus tour.

This morning, I was out shooting at various locations on the Elizabeth Line for our future feature on this topic, and then I relocated from my previous base in Stratford to St. Pancras, where we’ll spend the first two nights of the tour. The St. Pancras station, dating to 1868, is a spectacular structure dubbed “The Cathedral of the Railways” on its opening. I will get some pictures to show you when the internet permits.

So that’s all for now — more of a Cliff Notes version of recent activity than I had planned, but given the difficulty in posting photos, I don’t really want to go on too long about things I can’t show you.

More soon.