The Year 2000

Presenter: Adrian Palmer

Physical Meeting at Shenfield Parish Hall

Adrian has over 50 years’ experience of being a rail fan. Occasionally his work took him overseas. His first self-led sortie was to West Germany in 1975, in search of steam. He made other trips on his own behalf to many exotic places and started organising overseas tours for the LCGB. He was very busy in 2000 and made several trips to Cambodia, Myanmar, Denmark, Cuba and Canada.  He did not neglect the home scene however and his talk comprised a chronological tour of pictures from abroad and in the UK in the first half of 2000. So he interspersed his foreign images with numerous shots of the UK scene (mainly preserved and industrial) in a rather eclectic way. It was very much narrated as an odyssey whereby we were treated to images of say Burma juxtaposed with pictures of the Bluebell line. And we continued in this way accompanying him on his peregrinations.  This rich diet also took in buses, trolleybuses and trams! Organising trips, especially abroad must have been a very complex affair, requiring great skill and it would have been interesting to know what challenges he faced, and how he managed to achieve extra stops on service trains and runs past, with the bonus of extra smoke – for the camera. There must have been interesting stories involving negotiations with train crews, etc. in unfamiliar languages. Adrian is still at it and has a second tour of Japan coming up this year.