OK, so I got a Drone - a DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus

Click here to see what "Dave" (Dave Drone) gets up to...

Wetherby Railway Station and Railway Line

Wetherby Race Course Railway Station

Old and new photos of Wetherby Railway Station and Wetherby Race Course Railway Station

The railway line through Wetherby was one of the first lines to go following the 1963 Beeching report The Reshaping of British Railways.

The photo to the left shows the little known Wetherby Racecourse Railway Station - how things have changed! See larger image below - and what the same place looks like today.

We also show photos of the main railway station in Wetherby, together with modern day views of the same places.

The next photo shows a steam locomotive just leaving Wetherby Railway Station and heading north. It may be going to Harrogate or through Wetherby and around past Wetherby Racecourse (where there was another Station - see below) and on to Tadcaster.

How Car Salesmen Fool You!

What's Your Car Really Worth?

It's happened again! A friend of mine has just bought a new car and told me all about it: what a good price he got for his old car: how he was offered SO much more for it than at some other garages.  He thinks he got a really good deal...

WRONG!

I used to sell cars at a main dealership: I was trained in car sales and know how these things work.  I KNOW he has been "suckered".  He thinks he got a good deal because he has been fooled into thinking he got more for his old car.

It is natural mistake for a car buyer to make though: a car is the most expensive purchase we make in our lives (apart from our house) and we obviously want to lose as little money/value as possible.  So car dealers prey on that and often APPEAR offer you more for your car than it is really worth!  BUT you are not really getting that amount of money for your part exchange.

Building the BIG outdoor cat run

Pixie Kitten said: "Can we have a bigger cat run please?"

Please build us a bigger cat run!

It had been a while since we built our original cat run and it was time to take the plunge and build our two cats a bigger and better cat run to give them much more space in their secure enclosure.

At the moment we have a cat flap, cut into the side of the conservatory, which leads out into the cat tunnel. The tunnel takes our cats down the side of the garden and opens out into their existing 6' x 6' cat run which is joined onto the garden shed.

The plan is to cover the whole of the patio and garden, between the conservatory and the existing cat run, with a big pergola/cage enclosure. This area is about 6.5m x 5m and we wanted the whole enclosure to be about 7' high so that we could also walk freely within it.

Improving the Cat Run

So, we had already built the cat tunnel and run but as our girls got bigger we wanted them to have more space to play in and explore. It was a "3 dimensional" space... as they could climb ON the Kitty Shack and the wooden crate as well as get inside them and they had the large tree branches to climb on... but they soon got used to it and kept looking into the garden shed through the window!

You could see them thinking "I wonder what's in there?"
So I got a saw...

Wetherby Photos Past and Present

Fascinated by how things used to be compared to how they look now...

I am hoping to start a photographic archive of Wetherby - comparing photographs from the past with those of the present.

See, also, our page of photographs and information about Wetherby Railway Station

Here is a start:

York Road - HMS Ceres Naval Training Base - (now Wetherby Young Offenders)



HMS Ceres, Wetherby, Main Gate

 This shows the main entrance and gatehouse of HMS Ceres Naval training Base. Originally built in 1942 and intended to be one of two hostels for the munitions workers at the nearby Thorpe Arch Royal Ordnance factory (now a retail park!). However it was commandeered by the Admiralty and became the training base HMS Cabot, renamed HMS Demetrius in 1943, finally becoming known as HMS Ceres.

In 1958, when the Navy base moved to Chatham, the site became a borstal - Wetherby Young Offenders Instiute - and is now known as HMYOI Wetherby Secure College of Learning and this next photo shows the same view today.

How to Make an Outdoor Cat Run

Tigerlily and Pixie Kitten

A while ago, we got two feral kittens. We rescued them, when their mother got killed on a busy road, and named them Tigerlily (on the left) and Pixie Kitten (on the right). However, we also live on a busy road so didn't want them to roam free as they would almost certainly get run over too: our previous cat did! At the same time, we didn't want to force them to be "indoor cats"...

So, we were faced with building some sort of cat enclosure, a safe outdoor cat run, where they could go any time they wanted.

We have a conservatory at the back of the house and an 8' x 6' garden shed about 28 feet away, at the other end of the garden.  Our idea was to build a large cat run around the shed... but how to safely get the cats from the conservatory to the secure run?