Return from holidays

I have just come back from an excellent two weeks holiday, four days of which were spent in Dubai.
Dubai is a wonderful, modern, vibrant and thought provoking city as its modern architecture challenges some of the building principles that infants are taught in nursery schools. I would not have believed that you can have such shapes to buildings if I had not seen them with my own eyes.
The city’s sleek new Metro system is very clean but not fast enough. It just about reaches the speeds of a heritage railway. Neither are the stations all best strategically placed. Now this all reminded me of home! Dubai deliberately has set out to achieve the longest, newest, biggest wherever it can and it is impressive. So is the museum in the old fort. It has a good look at old culture mixed with recent history. The overhead photos of 2000 and 2010 are mind-blowingly different. Again it reminded me of here, where we seek to write preservation history, as achieved this year with three black Terrier Class locos, City of Truro’s visit, etc etc.
I visited the “Versace” shop in Dubai. There was a very nice shirt that I found which had a superb design and a wonderful feel as I searched for the price tag. I removed my clean hands quickly when I saw the tag which equated to £1100. There was so much wealth in the city, with so many Ferrari, Bentley, Porsche and Lexus cars that it was impossible to count them. A stark contrast with K&ESR!
The city’s main mode of transport is taxi. There are 10,000 taxis for a city with a population of just 2 million. But they are all busy because the fares are cheap. Dubai has no VAT, no income tax, cheap fuel and a really buoyant economy. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned. Mr. Cameron should pay it a visit as a tourist.

One of the best things about holidays is that when you return suitable refreshed you see new challenges and deal with them in a different way. We are making some minor changes to our IT which should help us going forward, including speeding up the booking office process.

It was straight back to Santa Specials which have got off to a tremendous start. We were sold out last weekend and I am sorry that we disappointed so many people that turned up without booking.
I did also feel sorry for the woman who was extremely rude to one of our staff because we had not sent her the tickets for the 2pm departure which she said she had booked over the phone. Now she had turned up only to find that there was not even a 2pm departure! Her language was quite rich and richer still when she discovered she had booked for another heritage railway. As they had not sent her tickets they will remain anonymous. We of course have no such incidents and cannot understand why anyone would choose to go to another Heritage Railway for “Santa” anyway.

As I write this, we have had another busy weekend and two more “Santa” days are nearly full, so it pays to book. We have had a fantastic year, and it is ending in great style, with thankfully no snow. We are grateful for everybody’s support in achieving this, whether it our mainly volunteer staff, our members, our loyal customers, and our suppliers and contractors. To all of you I extend my thanks and wish you a very Happy Christmas.