Newsletter January 2001

Pictures may take a while to download but please have patience - I hope you'll think they are worth waiting for !!

There was no Newsletter for December due to an attack of sloth and bewilderment which overcame your webmaster (the "Festive Season" had nothing whatsoever to do with it despite rumours to the contrary !!) I finally got the scanner to work but there are a lot of photos still to be scanned and with the transfer of a great deal of the pages to Alan Rolfe's server (thanks Alan) a lot of HTML re-coding had to be done and I only know how to do it the old-fashioned way, using trial and error and notepad.exe. Anyway, enough of all that - the big news of the moment is that the Sa Pobla extension has finally opened. Here's how the Majorca Daily Bulletin reported it on December 28th last year:-

I'm afraid this particular newsletter is very much "under construction" and I will be adding to it over the next two or three weeks as I get myself organised, so please keep coming back to see what develops !!

Just one photo, for the moment. This was sent to me by Peter Martin (thanks Peter) and shows the station at Empalme during the reconstruction work last summer.

STOP PRESS

The latest news from the Majorca Daily Bulletin (Internet Version), dated 5th of January:-

No sooner has the line been re-opened than they put up the fares (shades of the British railway companies)

I have finally got the video of the film which John Huntley shot in Majorca in the winter of 1955/6. The film, because of expense, has not yet been professionally digitally mastered or edited and is a straight transfer, warts and all from the original 16mm B/W cine film. If we could get enough people together to cover the production costs (£300 for 30 copies of a professionally mastered video) this would be terrific so e-mail me if you would be interested in having such a copy. I have transferred the whole film (approx 8 minutes including Soller Railway) to my own computer where, as a compressed mpg file, it takes up 79 megabytes, the original avi file takes 177 Mb !!! It is only short but includes good footage of several steam locos at Palma, including LLoseta (Nasmyth Wilson 4-6-0T of 1887) and Arta (Nasmyth Wilson 4-4-0T of 1877 or 1881). To whet your appetites I have made a very short 750Kb clip which you can download here but you will need the DivX ;-) MPEG4 Hi-Res Video Codec before you can view it on your own computers. Google for it and provided you follow the fairly simple instructions it will install on your computer causing no trouble, not using any bad behaviour or language but will act in the background to enable the playing of these files in conjunction with your Windows media player. Probably the best solution would be for you to create a new folder somewhere, call it codecs and unzip the file into that folder, then run the file Now, here's a captured frame from the original video to whet your appetites.

Hopefully I shall have more news and pictures for you before the end of the month.

I have produced Galleries of Pictures of the Sóller Railway and the Sóller Tramway and these will appear as soon as we can complete the transfer of this website to another host with more space for all our pictures. Meanwhile an archive of my own Sóller Railway photos can be found here

Watch this site for further developments which will take place whenever new information or pictures come to hand. Any submissions of information, photos old or new, postcards, etc., will be very gratefully and enthusiastically received and if used on the site will be suitably acknowledged (as above). The photos, pictures and diagrams used on this site are presented for your information and viewing pleasure only. If any of them should be in copyright violation and the copyright holder would care to notify me I will either remove them or acknowledge the copyright accordingly.