I had to go up to Kirkby Stephen East this afternoon to pick up some things but as I was putting my shoes on around three the heavens opened. We had the biggest deluge that I've seen anywhere in England for a long time (although to be honest it was tame stuff compared with some of the autumn monsoons we get in Japan). It fairly stair-rodded it down here for two hours and going up to the Station seemed a bad, bad idea, especially with the old place so churned up by diggers over the last couple of weeks.
Anyway in the end it did stop raining and I drove up through the floods on Nateby Road. When I got there it wasn't as bad as I'd feared - there were some small ponds formed near the Tebay Platform extension but not the lake I had anticipated.
The reason soon became apparent. A while back I mentioned that we had discovered the old cast iron water column feed pipe hereabouts, but today's heavy rain had also revealed the location of the iron cover of the old drain that the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway had installed to drain away overflow from the water column. Amazingly after 150 years that drain is still working! It was very successfully coping with this afternoon's deluge.
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