The Transport Trust has put up another of those 'Red Wheel' plaques that celebrate the role of various important transport elements in the industrial history of this country.
The latest one is at Standedge Tunnel, and it was unveiled by Jason McCartney MP last weekend.
Here he is (left) with James Dean (Standedge Visitor Services Manager), Judy Jones (heritage advisor for British Waterways), Rob Shorland-Ball (Transport Trust) and Peter Stone (Transport Trust).
Red Wheels are like the Blue Plaque scheme marking houses where famous people dwelt in the past.
Except instead of celebrating the life of anyone in particular, they are marking the relevance of various sites to industrial history.
That's great! I think it's nice that such prominent and eminent places should be honoured like this.
Only, all is not well here.
I've not seen other Red Wheels closeup, but I did check this one, and was dismayed!
Look closely - very closely - and you'll see the length of the tunnel measured in kilometres.
I mean, what is the point, what is the blessed point of going to all this trouble, extolling the past, when you are going to trample on it ignorantly like that?
You might as well go the whole hog, cater for the future, and emblazon all the words in Esperanto.
I don't know whose myopic idea of heritage this is. Could it be Judy Jones ('Heritage Advisor'), or it could be one of those two Transport Trust blokes (Rob Shorland-Ball or Peter Stone).
Either way, I bet you could dig up the corpses of any of the various engineers in the project, and find they'd be spinning so fast you could set them to work drilling whole new tunnel themselves.
They'd do it in furlongs and chains, of course. Just the way they measured out the original tunnels were measured out, 200 and more years ago. Go through the tunnel now and you'll still see many of the original chain markers, marking out the distance to the nearest portal.
(See below, where I photographed them when Granny went through in 2004.)
Not that you'd ever find that out from the Standedge item on www.transportheritage.com [sic].
Grrrr.
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