The Great Marquess

Today's the day ........................ to be back in Dear Old Blighty

We landed today at Manchester Airport after a 15-hour flight from Singapore within one minute of the expected time of arrival.

In fact - over the past six weeks, we've travelled tens of thousands of miles by road, sea and air - and amazingly - everything has gone to plan without any hitches that I can think of. Until we got to Manchester, that is. It took us nearly an hour just to get through passport control - and that's with a British passport. Maybe if they'd had more than just a couple of officers on duty, the queue wouldn't have been quite so enormous.

Then the train that we were catching from Manchester Airport to Kendal broke down and they had to put on another one. But that meant that we had to change at Preston and the train was really busy with everyone squashed into three carriages instead of six.

The only good thing about changing at Preston was that we caught sight of this little beauty - the 2-6-0 Class K4 No. 61994 The Great Marquess, built in 1938 at Darlington Locomotive Works to a design by Gresley for the West Highland Line.

I've no idea why she was there but that's just another of the quirky things about travel in the UK .........................