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Snowdrift at Bleath Gill

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  1. DanBC
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    Please feel free to move this to a different tildes group if you think it fits better there. And I always welcome help with tagging. This is a 1950's documentary about driving a train (a steam...

    Please feel free to move this to a different tildes group if you think it fits better there. And I always welcome help with tagging.

    This is a 1950's documentary about driving a train (a steam train) across an English hillside railway line, and getting stuck in snow, and being rescued. It's short, at just under 10 minutes. It's a remarkable look at 1950s industrial Britain. A few things stick out for me. Firstly, the clothing appears to be mostly everyday wear, which at the time was wool or cotton which must have sucked. Their method of de-icing the engine feels a bit risky. And there's a bit where they're digging snow, and they're all coughing. This is because most people in the 1950s smoked heavily.

    Wikipedia has a short article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowdrift_at_Bleath_Gill

    As far as I can tell, this is the location in Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+Stainmore,+Kirkby+Stephen+CA17+4DH/@54.5100471,-2.2112973,16.29z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x487c44126b9ef3d5:0x57b22f1c846abc6d!8m2!3d54.512688!4d-2.26545

    I got that from this blog: https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/5291382

    Here's another blog with interesting detail: https://becausetheyrethere.com/2011/03/24/bleath-gill-whatever-happened-to-the-heroes/

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