The Architecture The Railways Built

Railway historian and fan Tim Dunn looks as if he’s about to enter the Temple of Dendur rather than an unprepossessing-looking railway shed in Derbyshire. 

But this isn’t just any railway shed, it’s the last operating railway turntable in Britain containing a “little nest of engines… the real life version of Thomas the Tank Engine.” And Dunn is thrilled to bits. 

He even gets to have a go working the turntable with an actual engine on it: “I could not be happier!” The shed, at Barrow Hill, was saved from demolition and restored after a massive, three-year fund-raising drive, spearheaded by one man, an enthusiast who couldn’t bear to see it disappear. 

Dunn also visits Bath and its lovely, elevated Brunel-designed Bath Spa station, whose Jacobean design and architecture bucks the elegant Georgian symmetry of the rest of the city.