grandad kit

Thank you for reading my blog. If you have difficulty seeing your grandchildren, or have any views about my situation, I would welcome your messages by e-mail through this blog site. If you wish, just use a first name or a nickname and your identity will be protected, like mine – “Grandad Kit.”

Dear “Tom”

Funiculi, funicula

I am your other grandfather, the one you have never met. You are three years old, and although I have never met you, I love you dearly and always will. You are my flesh and blood, and always will be. We will meet one day, I am sure. I am writing this daily "blog" to you to make up for the fact that I can't speak to you right now. I hope that one day you will be able to read this and then you will know that Grandad Kit and Nana Ann always did care for you, right from the day you were born.

Grandad is actually singing "Funiculi, funicular" and you might wonder if I've gone mad, btu not quite. If there's anything I'm mad about, its piers, seaside piers. In fact, Grandad is thinking of visiting every pier in England and wales - all 55 of them! But first I'm going to have to get someone to pay me to write about them! So today I went off to see the pier that's nearest to me, at Saltburn on the Yorkshire coast. And it was a great day.

The sun was shining, the sea was sparkling, the coast was clear, there was the pier itself of course, but best of all was the funicular railway. This is a very unusual railway, very unusual indeed. Not only does it run up and down the very steep, sloping cliff, to take people up and down between the top of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff where the pier goes out across the sea, but it is also worked - by water!

Yes, water. There are only two other funicular pier railways worked by water in the whole of the country. If only I could show it to you and tell you how it works. You see, there are two cars like small railway or tram carriages that run up and down the two sets of tracks. As one car goes down, the other comes up and vice versa. Each of the two cars has a big water tnak underneath.

Now, the car at the top oif the slope has no water in it at first. Then when the conductor on the bottom rings the bell, to signal that there are people in the bottom car who want a ride up to the top, the engineer at the top starts to let water into the tank attached to the bottom of the car at the top. Now water is heavy - if you don't know how heavy it is, try carrying a bucket full of water as I did many times as a boy, and you will see just how heavy water is - very heavy indeed.

When the water in the top car gets to be heavier that all the people in the bottom car, the top car starts to go down the track and the bottom car comes up to the top. The great thing is, no matter how many people there are in the bottom car, and how heavy they are, eventually there will be enough water in the top car to weigh mare then them! Then when the bottom car gets up to the top and the top car gets to the bottom, the same thing happens again.

Phew! That was a lot of work.

Love from

Grandad Kit and Nana Ann