Where can you get to from Shrewsbury?
I'm sorry I've got no gratuitous tourism in Shrewsbury going for you.
There's a castle which I haven't been to and a big shopping precinct
where I bought some sandwiches once.I do spend a lot of time in this station, though, waiting to change trains. If you see a bloke with a well-shaven head and a badly-shaven chin lurking most of the way down platform four and staring blankly into space like he's thinking about type theory, it probably isn't me, but you never know...
What else can I say? I've got to say something else, just so I can get the layout to behave.
Ah yes, the signals. Shrewsbury's a wacky five-way junction: three go south and two go north. Birmingham and Aberystwyth are both south, so you go out facing backwards if you came in facing forwards, which means it's really hard to book seats round a table.
But what about the signals? Well, what I was going to distract you with before I
got distracted was the fact that this wacky and rather gangling five-way
junction is still managed by mechanical signals. You know, levers and pulleys
and batches of wires running for yards and yards and yards (they're so old
they run for yards) along the side of the track.
I gather there are signals from three separate systems in Shrewsbury.
Goodness knows how they make sense
of it all, but one feels that they do make sense of it, as opposed to
electronic signals, where they make a mess of it, then blame the computer.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Shrewsbury is located underneath its railway station, in much the way that Birmingham is, but I can assure you it's not.