Wildlife & Railway Art - Frédérique Lucas

Nothing but steam these days in my posts! Ah well, can’t help myself. They’re wonderful machines. But there’s some wildlife art on the way as well for those who fancy that more.

In the mean time, have some hand-decorated steam engine shirts. One of a kind, since the illustrations are drawn directly onto the shirt with textile markers. They take an awful long time to make, but the end result is very much worth it! Guaranteed to give me something to wear.

Two of these engines reside at the heritage railway I volunteer at - obviously not Gadwall (not in the least because she was bombed to pieces in WWII). 23 071 is, together with her ‘sister’ 23 076, the fastest engine we have. Sporty engines those Baureihe 23s, the very last class to come out of Germany. 41 241 has been with us for about 3 years now, and is slowly being converted from oil-firing to coal-firing, so some day she can run again on our line. Unusually for a German engine, she carries a name: Polarstern, or Pole star in English. She was granted this name for travelling to Narvik, the most northern train station in Europe, and crossing the polar circle as she did so.