Tornado hits the Severn Valley

Yes, that's right - newly-built Peppercorn A1 no. 60163 "Tornado" - seen here on today's 11.00am departure from Kidderminster, due in Bridgnorth 12.05. Unusually, the threatened showers cleared, the clouds parted - and there it was, on Eardington bank. Wonderful!

And now for the older stuff...

The relatively recent video wasn't too difficult - just plug the camera into the firewire socket and away we go. A fair proportion was even easier than that - the raw video was still on the hard disk, it just needed re-editing and re-exporting for YouTube.

But now we're into the older material, recorded on a Sony Video 8 "Handycam". In those days, I'd used an ATI "All in wonder" vga card with video capture and a TV built in. But those were the days of Windows 95 / 98 - the card has never worked under XP. The little Canon Mini-DV camera has an option to input analogue video and directly output it through the firewire cable to the PC. Spaghetti everywhere! So we're off, revisiting content which dates from, at earliest, 1994. It's a slow job though, and some of the tapes are starting to deteriorate...

Here's another taster - one of my favourite early video recordings, of Santa trains on the NYMR - Lambton 0-6-2T, Cl 25 pushing, plus both "Austerity" 2-10-0s in action - and some nice light too. As before here's a direct link to the geoffspages channel on Youtube - now up to 47 clips.

YouTube

I've made a start on uploading the Geoff's Pages rail video clips to YouTube, for a variety of reasons. It'll take a little while - the links will be updated as and when the clips are moved. In the meantime, here's a direct link to the geoffspages channel on Youtube - and a sample...