Shrewsbury Steam Rally (25th - 26th August, 2013)
This is one of a series of pages I have uploaded to illustrate facets of the seven steam rallies we have attended in the UK. Click here for the 2013 introduction and overall index.
By now we were hooked, the hire cars remained affordable and could be paid for out of my new pension and the weather continued to be set fair for the foreseeable future. Shrewsbury was a dilemma, in theory we could have commuted daily but two hours each way twice on a bank holiday weekend was more driving than I really wanted to do. So with precious little by way of choice we booked a B&B in a 200 year old town centre pub with 'free' entertainment until 02.00. However, it was a long day and I was too tired to notice.
The show itself was brilliant (as was the weather on the second day) but even after many years, the organisers still haven't worked out how to get thousands of visitors off the A458 into Onslow Park without creating a huge queue ("not our problem to solve" was a not very clever reaction). The way the pairs of parking lines were set out omitted to leave easy access to the pay kiosks where we had another long queue or an easy exit where most had to queue again. It was a problem we didn't face at any other rally and was bound to put some casual visitors off returning.
To return to the rally, there were some 70 engines present and it probably had the best set of working exhibits we have seen, many of which (like the horses) were non-steam and aren't shown here. And the grand parade into the small main arena was simply mind boggling. We'll be back next year, probably just for a day, it'll mean an extremely early start from home and by doing a diversion to approach from the west, hopefully we'll get in as quickly as we did this time on day two when we were there before the gates opened...
There are two YouTube Video Clips available:
Choose the page you are interested in and within that, click on a thumbnail for a larger image. Then click again to return to the page.
