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Taking the train to Edinburgh

I recently visited Edinburgh for a conference. As I was in London I caught the train from Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley.

It was a damp early evening when I arrived at Kings Cross.

Went to platform one to get on my train.

The seat I was booked into was a table seat by the window. There was four of us on the table, so it was quite cramped.

I was quite impressed with the speed of the train, taking just four hours and twenty minutes from platform to platform.

Arrived at Edinburgh Waverley.

Walked along the platform to the overbridge.

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Then and Now Take Two Again – Edinburgh Tram

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. The first of the posts in this series was of a council building in Manchester. I always thought I should give then and now photographs a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. Now this has come to my attention I have started to intentionally take photographs of the same place.

This photograph was the Airport Tram stop in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Tram started running in May 2014.

Though in the early 2000s I travelled to Edinburgh a fair bit, by the 2010s I had stopped travelling up there. In the 2000s I would catch the bus from the airport to the centre. On the 1st December 2014 I made a trip to Edinburgh for a conference, it my first opportunity to travel on the then new tram. I took a photograph from the Airport Tram stop down the line.

Of course you take a photograph and then think nothing of it.

Five years later I am heading off to Edinburgh once more,  I hadn’t been to Edinburgh in the intervening period, though I had been to Glasgow a fair few times. Arriving at Edinburgh Airport and heading towards Haymarket the obvious thing was to take the Tram. Waiting at the stop I decided to take a photograph….

Not quite the same photograph, but pretty close.

I was back in Edinburgh in November 2019 as well, but didn’t take a photograph of the Tram stop.

I was back in Edinburgh in November 2022 and I intentionally took this photographs from the same perspective on the 16th November 2022.

It’s actually more central than the other two and it was taken directly into the sun!

On a visit to Edinburgh in March 2024, though I had caught the train to Edinburgh (from London), I travelled back to Bristol by air. This photograph was taken with an iPhone 13.

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Then and Now Take Two – Loughborough University Science and Enterprise Park

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. The first of the posts in this series was of a council building in Manchester. I always thought I should give then and now photographs a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. Now this has come to my attention I have started to intentionally take photographs of the same place.

I was back at Loughborough University for a conference. I have visited the university a few times before. I took this photograph of a view of the Loughborough University Science and Enterprise Park from the first floor of the Holywell Park Conference Centre in September 2007. It was taken with a Nokia N73.

When I looked at the image a few years ago, I couldn’t recall where I had taken it, I knew I had taken it at a MoLeNET planning meeting, but I really couldn’t remember where we had met. MoLeNET was the Mobile Learning Network, which was created by the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) in 2007 to facilitate and deliver a range of mobile learning projects for further education. As well as running projects, I was also a MoLeNET Mentor and helped to mentor other projects in the initiative. We had a fair number of planning meetings, which took place across the UK, sometimes in London, Leeds and this place. Having worked out that this September 2007 meeting was probably in Loughborough, I did a Google Street View search. It wasn’t Burleigh Court (where I had been as recently as October 2016) and I think that’s why I initially I didn’t think it was Loughborough.

So in March 2024 I was back at Holywell Park Conference Centre I realised I could take a similar photograph, so I did with an iPhone 13.