187 Steam train stops at country station

Full Episode description

You strode up to this field, through lush meadow, for a better view over Arley station. And now you’re here. It’s a perfect Shropshire August day. Blue sky. Light breezes. Hot sun on your back. Nearly time you think looking up into the sky, far right, for any sign of smoke. 
 
The whole station’s in view from up here. Here beneath the tall whispering trees, and basking grass crickets. There’s the empty waiting tracks, lined by high overgrown hedgerows. And a man down there. Hammer. Nails. Fence beside the gravelled track, being sporadically mended. Such a country scene. With such balmy country sounds. Benevolent. Timeless. There, watched by the circling buzzard. Chased away by rooks. 

And when it first came from over the horizon, it announced its imminent arrival with a blast on the whistle. Mile wide, its sound waves travelled. Through the cutting it then proceeded. To emerge like a resplendent surprise from under the old stone bridge. A heavily rolling, clanking, iron mass of hissing pressure, that gently squealed to a halt in the waiting station. 

As it waited for its passengers to board, it pressed against its wood block brakes, radiating heat. And a slowly building, smouldering hiss. And the whole valley seemed to brace itself for what it knew was about to come. The bridge and the sloping fields. The trees. The road. The buildings and even the sky. All braced themselves, to be turned inside out. Turned into a steam train dream. 
 
A steam locomotive, to give it it’s proper title, does not so much depart a station, as leave it in its wake. Its iron furnace contains such pressure, that when its valves expose its pistons to pump the girders that turn the giant wheels, it’s not just the air that’s kneaded like a dough, but the whole world around it. It’s a palpable sense of power that so surpasses anything you can have imagined, that all you can do is grin. Whilst fixed to the spot. In enchanted admiration. 

* We took this sound photograph of a steam train passing through Arley station last month. We recorded in high definition sound. After the train left, we left the box recording alone, to take in the soft rural wind in the trees, the crickets in the grass, the man mending the trackside fence, and all the other sounds of ordinary everyday life going on in this Shropshire valley.