Narrow gauge news from Airstrip One
British railfans have been rebuilding the Rheilffordd Eryri (Porthmadog to Dinas, Gwynedd) with donations of money from various sources, up to and including a big wad of pounds from the Millennium Commission in the UK. After they went through this money, they had half the railway finished and were shopping around for funding sources to complete it.
I've been looking in at their website occasionally to see if anything new has happened, and today I looked in to see that the EU and the Welsh Assembly Government had given them £5,000,000 to help complete the other half of the railway. And they're hoping to have all 25 miles of the line back in operation by 2009. The cloud around this silver lining is that they're estimating it will take £10,500,000 to completely finish the line, so they still need to beg for money.
Fortunately, it doesn't sound like they need all the money now (and I don't have £6000 lying around right now, either) so I can wait for the US elections to finish up before seeing how much I could possibly donate to the Rheilffordd Eryri.
As an added bonus, K1 (or K2, or K(1+2)/2) is back in steam, and has been trucked up to Dinas to start generating revenue. This means that come 2009, the best, the bears, and I might be able to ride behind K1 from Dinas to Porthmadog, then behind Russell back to Dinas. I can hardly wait.