Celebration of the internal combustion engine, event.

[forddeliveryboy]

Took the children to Tractor-fest at Newby Hall near Ripon today, turned out a good experience. It's repeated tomorrow for anyone who's interested.

 

Bloody good organisation behind the scenes meant a very relaxed show of old tractors and anything else vaguely related to agriculture. Which turned out to be an eclectic, broad church of internal combustion machinery from Mobylettes, veteran cars, early Australian tractors, 70s car chod and some wonderful stationary engines, not the usual sad little line up of tiny things some big agricultural shows manage. In fact, there were mad engines smoking away as far as the eye could see.

 

The common theme was that people were interesting and interested, there weren't rows of boring over-restored repetitiveness, neither was there daft tractor-style pineappling. A good helter-skelter, dodgem cars and more helped the two mini-fdbs maintain their interest over a whole day, it was a massive event yet felt intimate.

 

There wasn't a single steam engine in sight, and it didn't matter, unusually.

 

The pics give a pretty poor reflection of what was there, some were taken when cars and other wheeled things were out on a run, having two under-6s doesn't help.

 

[forddeliveryboy]

The kids dictated we went into the adventure playground within the house gardens, which has a miniature railway with three interesting locos pulling ticket holders along the river bank. On my own I could have filled the memory card with pics of the tractorfest, I'm not a tractor nut but the displays were properly good, think more Retromobile than NEC.

 

Anyway, I'll post what's left,

 

The theme this year was twin cylinder, not that many of these reflect that!

 

[forddeliveryboy]

 

There was only one obvious sales pitch, near the entrance and supposedly very prominent but you only really saw it on the way back to your car. After everything else it did look a wee bit absurd.