FULL of nostalgia is my picture this week from the archives of our excellent local railways society, the 8D association.

Bold Power Station, with its distinctive cooling towers, is now gone.

Gone are what remained of Bold Colliery. Gone in the distance are the 'stuff rooks' - those mountains of coal waste.

A miner once told me that around two per cent of coal dug is waste. Thus the amount of coal dug out from beneath our feet would be 50 times higher than those you see there.

The Dream statue stands about 100 metres above sea level. Imagine it standing on a plinth 5,000 metres high. It would take even Mo Farah a while to run to that top.

Gone are the days of the passenger trains being hauled by a locomotive, or catching a passenger train east across the Pennines. Now, it is also all electrified, but only to Manchester.

Back in 1966, around the time England won a certain football trophy, I travelled from Lime Street to Euston for a job interview, and by a new electric passenger train.

With the promised bonus of North Sea Oil, the politicians talked of the whole country having an electrified railway network... and 50 years on, er?