The Wood Train

Twice in a week I have shifted large amounts of chopped wood.  Last Friday I helped unload a trailer of logs, and today I cleared the old outside toilet of firewood.  We were fortunate to inherit a good store of firewood and two half-bunkers of coal; old coal, as the joke has it.  

Clearing the wood reminded me of the wood trains on the Ratty.  When I was younger I spent a few holidays volunteering on the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway, the Ratty.  Most of the engines were steam-powered and ran on coal, but the drivers used wood to get a good blaze going.  Every couple of weeks a train of empty carriages was taken up to the woods at the top of the valley and halted outside a stone shed. This used to be a forge, but was now one of the railway's wood stores.  Filling every crevice on the train with eighteen-inch logs took about an hour, and the logs were unloaded again at Ravenglass sheds and then the carriages cleaned for the passengers.  It was a hard afternoon's work for a city-soft teenager, but great being out in the fresh air, the dense woods at the top of the valley, the strange old forge with its huge, silent furnace.