Diverted! Swinton to Chesterfield via Rotherham, Barnsley & Sheffield

MEETING REPORT 11^th MAY 2022.  For our final meeting of the 2021/22 season we welcomed the return of Phil Lockwood and Enid Vincent with the fourth instalment of their epic presentation 'Diverted! Swinton to Chesterfield via Rotherham, Barnsley & Sheffield'.  Those of us who had seen the previous talks knew that we would be viewing a rich and detailed narrative as the speakers took us along many lines quite close to home through a host of slides taken over a 40-year period.  Even so the interesting facts and connections associated with many of these locations still managed to surprise and impress the rapt audience.  Commencing at Swinton, where the previous talk had terminated, we travelled via Rotherham (Masborough) to Meadowhall before tracking northwards to Barnsley.  We then made a second pass of the first part of this journey, this time via Mexborough and Rotherham Central, at the same time watching the development of the tram-train project up to the present day.  Finally having arrived in Sheffield via both the Midland and GC routes we progressed to Dore before making the final lunge through the Bradway Tunnel to Shangri-la (i.e. Chesterfield!). The speakers' selection of more than 200 slides - the overall total for the series was close to 1000 - featured a wide variety of locomotives and rolling stock and diverse loads and liveries and was of great interest purely from this perspective, quite apart from the historical changes in the track layout and infrastructure.  It was a bitter-sweet moment to reach our final destination, but the thought lingered that perhaps Phil and Enid could be persuaded to return with a further talk covering some of this territory that they know so well: or even to re-run the whole series again!