The Railway Murders - Book Review

 

 

The Railway Murders
A Yorkshire Murder Mystery #8

by J.R. Ellis (2022)
Audible narration by Michael Page, 8:15 h

The 8th installment in J.R. Ellis' series about DCI Oldroyd & co in Yorkshire. I enjoy these books for a combination of reasons: The Yorkshire setting, likeable main characters, and focus on classic mystery solving rather than on too much detail of violence and forensics etc. 

In The Railway Murders each chapter starts with a reference to classic films/books about other murder mysteries involving trains. In this book, the setting is a museum railway, and the murder takes place in connection with a film shoot. It's a classic "locked room" mystery, as a film star has been shot dead in a train carriage, with the cameras rolling outside. But the victim was alone in the carriage, and nobody else was seen going in or out... So the mystery is as much about figuring out how it was done, as by whom.

For me, it was easy to imagine the setting of this book... My father was a railway and steam engine enthusiast, and on two family holidays by car in England and Wales back in the early 1970s, we visited several museum railways like this, also including train rides. 

What I also appreciate about this series is that besides the Kindle books being fairly cheap, one can also add the audio book at a real bargain price when buying it together with the Kindle book. I don't really know who Michael Page is, but I find listening to him reading these stories a joy in itself. So I mostly listened to this book, even if I also bought the Kindle.

Skywatch / No Limit 2020 (6)

Monday this week was another sunny autumn day, and I decided to go back once again to the Norrby district and try to find a mural that I missed on my previous walks. On my way, I also snapped photos of the railway station and other views that happened to catch my eye.

The railway station

Someone commented on a previous post that I should walk this way more often - so I did!

The tower sticking up belongs to the oldest church in town (17th century)

Having passed under the railway to the other side:
Here is a graffiti wall where anyone is allowed to be creative.
(I'll take you back there in a separate post.)

Artist: Elina Metso

This is the mural that I managed to miss on my previous walks. Not really surprised that I did not find it earlier, because there is no sidewalk on the other side of the road from it (and a road with very heavy traffic). The only way I could take a photo was from the sidewalk just underneath, and bending my neck backwards... 

The photo below is copied from the official No Limit Facebook page. I still don't understand where they took that photo from. The skylift used to paint it, perhaps? (There are no buildings on the other side of the road - only a steep narrow strip of woodland, as in the background of the photo with the graffiti wall.)

 

Artist: Delicious Brains

 

The 'tower' in the background is a district heating plant.

A mural from a previous art festival, some years ago.
I think maybe its colours have faded a bit.

On my way back home - "skywatching" from a bridge over the railway

Work Still In Progress

In a WIP post a couple of weeks ago I showed some photos from work on the railway nearby. They are making progress. The photo above was taken from a footbridge, 25 July. The ones below at a level crossing a bit further away, 31 July. (The yellow train is involved in the process.)

 

The purple plant in the foreground in the last photo I think is called willowherb or fireweed in English. In Swedish it goes by a number of different names, including one (rallar-ros) that would translate as "navvy's rose" in English; referring to the fact that it often grows along railways.

As for myself, I'm still walking round pretty much in the same circles close to home; and I expect that is likely to continue for a while yet. (The corona-related statistics from our health authorities have kept improving a lot during the summer though.)

Work In Progress

It's been a couple of rather noisy days here to start the week. It wasn't too hard to guess at the source, though, as we had been forewarned earlier in the summer that there would be some work done on the railway nearby. Yesterday I did not bother about going out to check; but today when going out for a walk, I brought my camera and snapped a few photos. Whatever they were doing, it looked rather impressive. (I think they're exchanging the tracks.)

Meanwhile (and totally off track from the railway) I'm currently trying to get my head round the fact that from next month, I'll be an Old Age pensioner. Various letters from Authorities reminding me of it have kept dropping in all summer. As I've already been in work-injury-related retirement for several years, how I actually spend my time probably won't suddenly change very drastically.  However, one thing that will change is my pension. (A fact that does not come as a total surprise, but will probably still call for recalculations every now and then along the way.) At the moment, I have to confess I'm struggling a bit to find more positive aspects of becoming an OAP. ... I'll work on it ...

A Touch of White Magic

Today I went out for a walk around 11 am, to post some Christmas cards that have a long way to travel. Alas, the nearest letter box to where I live gets emptied as early as 9 am nowadays. (And guess who is never up that early in the winter?) So, as the weather was not too unpleasant, I decided to walk to the main post office - where the boxes are emptied later. The camera asked to come along, and we took a shortcut path that runs along the railway...

Long train coming...

Decided to walk a different way back home, just because after a very grey and dull month of November, almost anything looks interesting again now - with touch of frost or snow added to it.

 The old regiment buildings (nowadays housing businesses and apartments).

 I'm going to be a Christmas tree when I grow up...

My summer "Butterfly park" - now without butterflies...

Panorama 2

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how Google Photo surprised me with automatically turning some of my photos (taken with my mobile) into a panorama.

Today, I decided to put it to the test if the same thing would happen again if I deliberately took three overlapping photos in different directions from the same spot.

 Looking along a side street to the right.

  Looking straight along the row of houses ahead of me.

Turning a little to the left to also catch the school buildings on the opposite side of the street ahead.

And voilà... Not long after I got back home, and my phone was back on WiFi, Google again laid the puzzle (quite automatically), and made this panorama view for me:

This is from a part of town where I don't walk very often, and had not really intended to go today either. My plan was to buy some geraniums for my balcony, and for that purpose I took a bus to (the neighbourhood of) a certain garden center across town. After I had bought my four pots of flowers, instead of waiting for a bus back, I decided to try a path I spotted that seemed to lead in the right direction, through an underpass under a road and railway. It soon proved to be (as I hoped) a convenient shortcut to more familiar surroundings.

Here are some more photos I took along the way:

  A mural at what I assume must be a school.

  Large tenement buildings from the 1960s or 70s. 

This is a part of town that is some ways a weird mix of old and 'new', and nowadays predominantly inhabited by people from "all over the world". (Africa, Middle East, Asia... And a lot of muslims, judging by the dress code.)

There are some quite charming older tenement buildings too, though - looking especially pretty on a sunny spring day like this.

Some areas along the railway seem just to be waiting (still) for decisions about future plans for the railway.

The railway station. I think you probably have to buy your tickets online these days, though! (It's been so long since I last went anywhere by train that I'm not even keeping up any more with how to go about it... It might have changed next week anyway!)

The geraniums that accompanied me on my walk!