Pictures from Quainton Road, 29/08/2005

On August Bank Holiday Monday 2004, the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre at Quainton Road station had a rally, or an open day, or something of the kind. It was a repeat of last year's event and like last year, several Rat Bikers and one Pigeon Biker turned up, intending to repeat last year's fun.

Unfortunately, unlike last year, SneakyPete, who knows the organisers and had arranged our attendance, couldn't make it due to heavy medical reasons. Without our "man on the inside", some other organising geezer decided to make a pain in the arse of himself and refused to let the rats actually take part in the rally. So we ended up parked on the grass by the entrance, the first thing anyone saw as they arrived at the show.

The laugh was on them though, in a way... one chap turned up in his XK120 replica. The guys on the gate didn't realise it was a replica, and entered him in the show. Which I at least found quite funny.

Here are some photos taken at the event. Unfortunately the vehicle park was far from spacious, and heavily loaded with both vehicles and people. Hence a lot of the photos are crap, with too much gubbins in the background. The bikes were parked a lot more closely than the cars, which is why there are many more car than bike photos; there were plenty of cool bikes, but most of them were utterly impossible to take any kind of photo of. Some of the photos I have heavily cropped, some of them I have edited out the worst of the background clutter (there are some really ugly stunted lampposts in that car park) and some of them I couldn't be arsed. Please enjoy the machinery in the photos without worrying too much about the shameful quality.

Click on the picture of your choice for a larger version. Some of them aren't that much larger though.

Here are the rats on parade. (And a couple of random shiny bikes that parked next to us.) All were here last year as well, but many who made it last year sadly didn't make it this time round.





And here we see the shiny bikes - at least, those of them that I could make some sort of shift at getting a decent angle on. There seemed to be a remarkable number of Scotts, which was gratifying for a two-stroke enthusiast like myself, and quite a few V-twins of various makes. The little toy bike made out of a Honda 50 with the "for sale" sign on it was as close as any of the shinies got to ratdom.






And now for the cars - seemingly a larger and wider range than last year. To my great delight, one of them was an immaculate Volvo 123GT. Other notable highlights were the Jaguar SS100, the Corvette, a quite stunning ancient Jensen, and a big green thing with a most remarkable grille that I was quite unable to identify but found most impressive nevertheless. (I have since been told that it's a 1930s Triumph Dolomite. Coo! I didn't even realise it was British!)











On the railway side, things were much the same as last year - same Hall in the shed, same tankies doing rides, same diesel generator - so not much new to photograph. There seemed to have been some small progress made on the big South African beast, seen here with a human figure to emphasise the huge size of the thing - on 3 foot 6 gauge track and all. There was also a platform trolley loaded with suitcases and pigeon baskets, complete with two model pigeons making a bid for freedom. At one time there were so many pigeons carried by rail that they laid on special trains for them. Doesn't happen at all now.






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