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UK trip continued
So, Friday Dec 27th wherein ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jiggery_pokery and I went to York for the day (I should backlog this later). We got a slightly later start than anticipated but were still on a train at 11ish and in York at noonish. We immediately went to the National Railway Museum, which was sort of the goal for the day... and we spent like 4-5 hours there in all. I mean, in terms of train museums, and I've been to quite a few, this one is pretty huge. There's a big main room with trains to look at (but not in, sadly) and a steam engine rotator demo, and a cafe (where we had small lunch-like stuff), and bizarrely, a shinkansen exhibit, which was one of the more memorable things to me because they seriously had a 1976 0 Series shinkansen there and the info about the shinkansen in general was from 1976. VERY WEIRD.
There was a huge warehouse room with tons of just... stuff from trains. Chairs, silverware, signs, model trains, light fixtures, you name it -- just things that had been on various trains at some point in the past. They also have a model train there that they use for training people to use signals, and they also had a 9 3/4 platform sign that had been specifically made for JK Rowling's visit to the museum. (We had to look that one up.) Something about that room was, I was halfway through looking through it when realized I left my backpack in the cafe. This was very distressing because my passport and Google badge were in there. HOWEVER, despite us having left the cafe 10-15 minutes prior, the bag was still sitting there on the chair I'd been sitting at! Wow! I must say that I basically never left my backpack ANYWHERE again for the whole trip after that.
There was another big area full of train switching stations where you could watch the monitoring boards that show where the trains are starting/stopping, which lines are clear, etc -- and an observation deck outside it where you could watch trains going into and out of York station (and conveniently they had all of these things showing you exactly which trains would show up!) The rest of that area was dedicated to talking about really bad train mishaps that involved mostly human errors in signalling where two trains would end up in the same place, collide, and people would die. Also there was a section about how uniting the country in one timezone was necessary due to train travel (which I knew, but had forgotten originated in England) timetables.
The Station Hall had some royal trains and whatnot but other than that wasn't particularly interesting, and there was a train photography art room, and then we decided to leave and wander around York. Unfortunately by that point I looked it up and found out that the Jorvik Viking Center had closed at 4pm (thanks to Puzzle Pirates I really did kinda want to go to Jorvik, it was the first island that my flag took over and I still own a shop there 10 years later). Alas. So, we looked for things that were still open in York and decided to go to THE CHOCOLATE STORY!
York Chocolate Story is not a tour of an actual chocolate factory, sadly, but you do get to hear a history of York and the chocolate production there, like the Terry and Rowntree families and how they evolved from making hot chocolate drinks into making real chocolates, and of course Rowntree and the KitKat bar, and we got to see a little bit of how chocolate is made, and we made chocolate lollipops, and ate truffles and all sorts of other samples. They had a display of Japanese KitKats but didn't actually know what half of them were, which was kind of odd.
After that we walked around York a little and then took the train back to Thornaby and came home. Amusingly, we ended up having McDonald's for dinner, and then I packed up and got ready to leave for the next leg of my journey.
jiggery_pokery and I went to York for the day (I should backlog this later). We got a slightly later start than anticipated but were still on a train at 11ish and in York at noonish. We immediately went to the National Railway Museum, which was sort of the goal for the day... and we spent like 4-5 hours there in all. I mean, in terms of train museums, and I've been to quite a few, this one is pretty huge. There's a big main room with trains to look at (but not in, sadly) and a steam engine rotator demo, and a cafe (where we had small lunch-like stuff), and bizarrely, a shinkansen exhibit, which was one of the more memorable things to me because they seriously had a 1976 0 Series shinkansen there and the info about the shinkansen in general was from 1976. VERY WEIRD.There was a huge warehouse room with tons of just... stuff from trains. Chairs, silverware, signs, model trains, light fixtures, you name it -- just things that had been on various trains at some point in the past. They also have a model train there that they use for training people to use signals, and they also had a 9 3/4 platform sign that had been specifically made for JK Rowling's visit to the museum. (We had to look that one up.) Something about that room was, I was halfway through looking through it when realized I left my backpack in the cafe. This was very distressing because my passport and Google badge were in there. HOWEVER, despite us having left the cafe 10-15 minutes prior, the bag was still sitting there on the chair I'd been sitting at! Wow! I must say that I basically never left my backpack ANYWHERE again for the whole trip after that.
There was another big area full of train switching stations where you could watch the monitoring boards that show where the trains are starting/stopping, which lines are clear, etc -- and an observation deck outside it where you could watch trains going into and out of York station (and conveniently they had all of these things showing you exactly which trains would show up!) The rest of that area was dedicated to talking about really bad train mishaps that involved mostly human errors in signalling where two trains would end up in the same place, collide, and people would die. Also there was a section about how uniting the country in one timezone was necessary due to train travel (which I knew, but had forgotten originated in England) timetables.
The Station Hall had some royal trains and whatnot but other than that wasn't particularly interesting, and there was a train photography art room, and then we decided to leave and wander around York. Unfortunately by that point I looked it up and found out that the Jorvik Viking Center had closed at 4pm (thanks to Puzzle Pirates I really did kinda want to go to Jorvik, it was the first island that my flag took over and I still own a shop there 10 years later). Alas. So, we looked for things that were still open in York and decided to go to THE CHOCOLATE STORY!
York Chocolate Story is not a tour of an actual chocolate factory, sadly, but you do get to hear a history of York and the chocolate production there, like the Terry and Rowntree families and how they evolved from making hot chocolate drinks into making real chocolates, and of course Rowntree and the KitKat bar, and we got to see a little bit of how chocolate is made, and we made chocolate lollipops, and ate truffles and all sorts of other samples. They had a display of Japanese KitKats but didn't actually know what half of them were, which was kind of odd.
After that we walked around York a little and then took the train back to Thornaby and came home. Amusingly, we ended up having McDonald's for dinner, and then I packed up and got ready to leave for the next leg of my journey.