Vintage Lights

At the moment at Kirkby Stephen East we have the bits and pieces on site for the new 'vintage' platform lights. They are really beautiful modern copies of the traditional gas lights that still graced many stations back in the 1950's.

Here are a couple of pictures that will give you the flavour. The glazed heads for the lights are primed and safely stowed away in a coach to prevent any accidental damage to the glass, and the cast iron standards are at present being stored on the Tebay Platform.

I can't wait to see this lot up and in position and switched on, and especially with the lights on the rest of Darlington Platform also switched on and the platform doors open so that you can stand by the bookshop and see the sweep of the platform lights as they vanish out into the darkness. I think this is going to be one of the really 'special' perspectives of the restored station that will draw people's attention.

Unless you are involved in a committee meeting in the buffet car on a winter's evening you aren't likely to have had the experience of being on the Darlington Platform after dark. Amazing place - one of those spaces where you can really sense the ghosts of generations past crowding into the silence but also a very friendly haunting too.  If Walter de la Mare had been around he would have written a poem about it.