After I had visited Belgrave and the tin tabernacle on Saturday I made my way to Leicester's Museum of Science and Technology at the old Abbey Pumping Station.
For me the most interesting of the permanent displays there is the one devoted to Leicester's tram system, which closed down in 1949.
There was a model railway exhibition going on in out of the outbuildings. Part of it was housed in the structure you see at once. When I saw it I felt an instant thump of recognition in my stomach. It is the old bookstall from Leicester station, which was removed in 1984.
You know you are getting on when you come across something in a museum that you remember being used for real.
Yes - what about Laddie, the airedale who used to collect money at Wimbledon station for the Southern Railway Servants' Orphanage at Woking? He died in 1960, but I remember him, stuffed and in a glass case on the platform, still doing the same work in the 70s and 80s. Then he disappeared; so did the orphanage (it's a housing estate today). But in 1992 I was astonished to come face to face with him at the NRM in York; perhaps more so later to see him used on a poster advertising the museum.
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