Day 7 - Oxford to Coalport

It is a good day when everyone makes it to the hostel at night.
Crazy travel day today.  First, the train from Oxford to Birmingham was crazy full.  I had made reservations which worked out well for the four of us in D coach, but the 8 students in C coach were too timid to kick people out of thier seats, so they spent the whole hour in the space between two coaches.
The second train was a local train and not so busy, but Jeri nearly got left behind because she didn't get up with everyone else.  Fortunately, we snagged her before the train left.  Then, the bus we were expecting did not arrive.  We took a local bus, but got let off at the wrong spot and had about a 3K walk with our bags.  It didn't help that it started to rain and we hadn't had any lunch.  So . . . we were pretty grumpy when we showed up at the Hostel at 3 when we had expected to arrive about 1.  Then we were told the museums closed at 4.  Not happy.  However, when we made it to the museum finally, we were told, not 4, 6 and that we could take the shuttle bus back up the hill tomorrow morning with our bags.  So, much more cheerful, we too the bus to the Iron Museum (pretty cool), took the bus partway back to the Iron Bridge, and the rest of the way back to the hostel where people basically crashed until dinner.  This will definitely be an early night.

The Iron Museum tells the story of Iron work in the Gorge.  There were three major inventions that took place here.  The first was to discover how to use packed sand to cast iron, which previously had been cast in clay which is a slow and expensive process.  The second was how to purify coal into coke to use in melting iron ore.  That had done before using charcoal, but the charcoal was pretty forest-intensive.  Last, once there was a huge supply of iron, steam hammers were used to work the metal, but in the summer when the stream dried up, this became a problem.  The company actually re-used the water by pumping it from the lowest pool back up to the top pool to re-supply the engines.  I imagine that the water was no longer clean to drink, but it did allow the iron to be worked all summer long.