The Best Way to Organise Lego | What Lego should I buy for my child?

This is probably not the answer you expect, but here is my advice after years of dealing with lego-explosions in a playroom and the almost infinite capacity of my child to fascinate himself with lego creations. He started at age 4.

Totally depends on what type of builder your child is.

Some will thrive on freefrom building and eschew sets.

Others will love sets and making them, then never touch them (expensive hobby for a few hours' pleasure).

Others will enjoy sets and then destroy them and make all sorts of stuff and you'll wonder why you spent all that money (my son is the latter).

Just start small and see what type of joy they get from which modus operandi when introducing a child to lego.

However, I really would say, I have been burnt by trying to get cheap copies - quality is so variable that I regret it ever getting mixed with the real Lego. So, better to buy second hand lego, than new "lego compatible" IMHO.

Also, don't over taxonomise. Lego make 13,000 different pieces and thus there are nearly any infinite number of ways to organise. Again, see how your child builds and searches and take it from there. Lego builders recognise there is no perfect taxonomy. A lot of people instinctively start to sort/organise by colour, but actually that doesn't necessarily make great sense. Colour is generally easy to pick out in a mixed collection of pieces, so sorting by shape/size is much more helpful.

I over-sorted for my child and basically I did a ton of work sorting and he just ruined it all the time and was never bothered about looking for shapes at that age.

Our taxonomy now (and he appreciates it being organised like this, but it's still me that has to do it!)

- people and accessories

- any piece of size 1x2 or less (plates or blocks)

- decorative items (including smooth tiles)

- wheels

- pre-moulded shapes (e.g. fences, doors, walls, vehicle cabs)

- glass

- blocks

- plates

- special train parts (e.g. wheels, bogeys, magnetic couplings)

- engineering parts (anything with movement, clips, right angles, rotation etc)

Also, i recommend organising in phases. I used to do it as I picked stuff up, but it took ages. Now it all goes in a massive mixed drawer, then later it is sorted if there is time and inclination. Otherwise he just picks through the big drawer to find things.

Eventually I expect he'll start to organise in a way that suits him.

Finally - for storage, IKEA Trofast or other similar generic draw sets (we have some on wheels from Argos) are perfect.

Anatomy of a Bond Movie

It’s January 2021. It’s almost a year into the pandemic in the UK, we’re in lockdown, and we’re finding ways to stay busy and entertained. Over the last few weeks my young man took a fascination with Bond Movies, and we’ve end ended up watching all the PG ones at a rate of almost 1 per night.

This starkly revealed the formula for a Bond Movie, as they very clearly all follow a pattern of similar events and constructs.

I decided to capture it on paper. It fits pretty well with the 15 or so we’ve seen so far.

Anatomy of a Bond Movie: most of the movies seem to follow a generic formula

2 years of car driving data - analysis (including stage 1 remap)

I love driving and I love data. So why not combine the two? Well, I have.

At the time of writing I’ve had what-I-still-think-of-as-my-new-car for just shy of two years since new and every trip has been (intentionally) logged. What’s more, for the latter 7.5 months or so it has been running with a stage 1 map.

I initially started collecting my journey data because I was keen to see whether anything changed about the car as it was “run in”. (It did; but not for the reasons I expected). Data is acquired quite easily because it is all logged automatically by the car to its Skoda portal, although it only gives aggregate (average) data per trip. But that’s plenty to get started with.

I pull the data down every so often in excel and convert to CSV. I then point Tableau at these CSV files in order to build the visualisations. Because tableau can refresh and union multiple files automatically the process is fairly painless (despite Skoda conspiring to make it more awkward after their portal update) .

I learnt plenty of things along the way which I didn’t really consider in the first instance. But that’s the beauty of Tableau, because it’s so easy to slice, dice and re-visualise the data, that you can look at it in new ways without any heavy lifting.

So, the very first thing I wanted to look at

Long term economy

The simplest analysis of long term economy is simply to plot average trip speed against average economy returned. This pretty much comes out as we’d expect: that here is a sweet spot for economy once you’re up to a consistent cruising speed. Bear in mind, of course, this is not “instantaneous” economy at a given speed, but whole-trip average. For this reason I’ve plotted the size of the trip as the size of the circles and unsurprisingly we can see longer trips (green) towards both the upper end of average speed and average consumption.

Average trip economy vs. Average trip speed

The variation in results is, of course, due to many factors: weather, traffic, road condition, state of the vehicle, vehicle load and my driving style. I am by no means a “hyper miler” but some journeys I do drive a bit more economically. On the other hand, I’m not afraid to overtake in order to make safe and reasonable progress - so I tend to use a varied spectrum of the car’s capabilities.

There are probably several choices for the “best fit” regression curve. A straight line clearly doesn’t cut it as economy does not keep on increasing as the car goes faster. In the end I have used a polynomial of degree 3.

Perhaps what is surprising (to me) about this result, as it’s not something I’ve thought much about before, is how poor the economy is for short trips of low speed: trips to the shops and the like.

Loss of Smell in Coronavirus - The seduction of numbers

Yesterday caught a brief moment of Professor Van-Tam at great pains to explain that loss of smell as a symptom made only a teeny-teeny-teeny-tiny difference to the number of those who could be predicted with #coronavirus.

Now, the thing is, studies have shown this sort of thing:

"For example, a British study released last week collected COVID-19 symptom data from patients through an online app. The data show that almost 60 percent of the 579 users who reported testing positive for the coronavirus said they’d lost their sense of smell and taste. But a significant portion of patients who tested negative for the virus—18 percent of 1,123 people—also reported olfactory and taste troubles."

At first glance this is very confusing - surely if 60% of coronavirus patients report loss of smell, it HAS to be a good predictor even if/especially since that number is much lower (18%) in general (for other conditions & non-conditions)?

Van-Tam seemed to be so adamant about the small predictive qualities of loss of smell, I figured I would think it through carefully and run some numbers.

I decided to imagine that "itchiness" was a new observation and plugged in some numbers to calculate how diagnosis plays out. On the left is a very simple Excel spreadsheet which calculates how many people are in each group based on general percentages. I've used some representative percentages that are in the right ballpark to help make the thing (hopefully) more realistic.

It turns out that even if 60% of covid sufferers report itchiness, it is still a lousy predictor of them having the disease.

So what's going on here?

This is in the same realm as Simpson's paradox, which I discussed the other day:

In this case: A high percentage of small number (itchy with covid) can end up being much more diminutive than a small percentage of a high number (itchy without covid).

When the above observations are taken as individual groups, already KNOWING which group a person belongs to, it's certainly intuitive to draw the conclusion that you have a good predictor in the itchy-with-covid group.

But that's only AFTER the fact.

In reality, to start with, you don't have these groups, you are looking for a predictor in order to actually form them amongst a general population. And that is a different problem.

In total many, many more people who are itchy will actually belong to the itchy-without-covid group, simply because the proportion who do genuinely have covid is a much smaller part of the population. (At least for now).

In my demonstration model, if someone reports being itchy, they are 5.7 times more likely to have something else than #covid19 even though 60% of those who have #covid19 report being itchy!

Notes

It doesn't matter what value to start the population at, it all works out the same. So you can treat "population" as "the number of people who report itchiness that day, or week, or who have done so in the last month" etc.

quote source at: https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/2020/04/lost-your-sense-of-smell-it-may-not-be-coronavirus

also see https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/loss-of-smell-taste-may-be-reliable-predictor-of-covid-19-study-67528

In what order should we return to work?

Continuing the theme of occupational risk analysis, here are some more ways to slice and dice the data.
If you had to restart the economy how would you go about it?

If a client came to me and asked “which departments should I start up, given that I want to do it as safely as possible?” then I’d start by asking for some data: how much does each department contribute (and what is their size) and how risky is their operation.

Then, by slicing and dicing the data accordingly, we look for opportunities which have least risk but best return. All things being equal (which they are not ⚠), finding these kind of opportunities which balance the priorities in the most optimal way usually means a bigger “return” on a small action.

This particular ONS occupational data doesn’t contain size of contribution to the economy (I’m sure somewhere there will be a dataset that could be joined with it), so for now I will illustrate the point with the sector size, as measured by number of workers. And actually, it’s not an unreasonable view: irrespective of their contribution to the economy, the more workers go back to work, the more a sense of some kind of “normality” will pervade for those workers and their families.

If we arrange our data on axes as follows, measuring sector size and risk score, then we would naturally target occupations towards the upper right as large-employers-with-low-risk. This region of the chart is not densely populated, but ultimately working leftwards from the right, anything towards the top (the biggest, greenest marks) would be a reasonable next candidate.

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Now, I bet you’re already making some interesting observations from that chart alone. And probably raising some objections to how useful it is. Bear with me.

Let’s look at the next question is raises: if I imagine a number of sectors do return to work, what impact does that have on the economy?

Again, we cannot measure economic contribution in this data set but let’s simply look at the number of workers. If a basic policy was to ask the least-risk workers to return to work first (based on lowest ranking of proximity to others) then we could start at the left of this chart and work rightwards occupation-by-occupation. In doing so, the line charts the the cumulative number of workers that would now be back at work.

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It’s interesting we can see a pretty sharp rise in numbers in the first half of the line: there are only a small number of workers with really low proximity risk, but actually there’s a steep rise in sector size after that such that about 50% of the workforce are actually in the lowest half for the proximity risk.
If you wanted to develop a targeted strategy for return to work, you could work along this line and ask these occupations to return to work (if indeed they stopped).
It also begs another interesting question: how far along this line do you need to go to make a significant difference to the functioning of the economy? E.g. if 50% of workers are working at more-or-less normal capacity, how functional is the economy? (is it operating at 10%? 50%? 90%?). We can’t answer that question with this data of course but the answer would be very informative.

Now, of course, this chart is a gross simplification. All of this is not that straightforward, as there are several compounding factors with the #covid19 lockdown situation:

• key workers are already at work to keep critical national functions running and indeed some of these workers are highest risk

• many of the lower risk workers who, by definition, have least contact with other people, are actually still working because they can work remotely

• some occupations which theoretically could restart rely on a market that is not available due to lockdown of movement and change in spending behaviour

So, to improve this analysis, one would need to be able to both remove workers who are already working from the picture and consider what else needs to be in place for some businesses to restart.

Moreover, there is considerable interlock between some occupations

• some people are prevented from working because they require “childcare” (I’m including school in that loose definition)

• some people are needed to work regardless because their function is so critical to public health or infrastructure

So, in fact, one would need to map out those interlocks and understand them to really identify which are the optimum occupations that could resume.

Data-led decisions

This would not be necessarily a trivial exercise. But either way, I’m hoping to demonstrate that these types of decisions can be data-led. That actually good data should allow us to make good decisions, even if - or perhaps especially if - they are difficult ones.

In closing, here’s a final (somewhat sizeable) chart which lists all the professions in the data set by, sorted by least proximity to other people (position in list & length of bar represents proximity level). The colour represents the combined risk score based on proximity and frequency of exposure to other people.
Hopefully this is sufficiently readable to find your own occupation (or its nearest equivalent).

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Occupational Risk in Relation to Coronavirus COVID-19

I written a fair bit (and analysed a whole lot more) of the COVID19 situation and data but not published here because, frankly, the minute it’s published it’s out of date. Moreover, even using official data sources such as John Hopkins University, there’s a kind of “data entropy” at work, where data volume increases over time, but quality reduces. I could do a whole post on that topic alone, but that’s for another day.

Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published an intriguing data set that quantified the nearly 400 occupations in the UK and, amongst other things, classified the type of contact with other people that workers had:

• proximity (ranging from touching to close distance to no close contact with people at all),

• and exposure ranging from many times a day to weekly/monthly/yearly to never.

This data can be explored interactively on the ONS website but I’ve also tried to produce some static readouts here, although it’s quite a challenge to compress this amount of data into a one-page visualisation! So, you will see a number of variations.

As the debate intensifies over whether to start schools up or not, it’s interesting to note that teachers and classroom assistants are basically in the next tranche of most-at-risk workers, behind the healthcare, police, cleaning and delivery key-workers that have kept critical services running. Many questions still remain (at the time of writing) as to the level of risk posed by the children they will mix with. Children, although seen to be less susceptible themselves to the disease, are certainly not immune.

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HOw does pay compare for those potentially most-exposed. Redder, larger, more-to-right = more at risk. Lower down = lower pay.

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Coloured by risk and size by percentile (% figure means x% of workers have this risk or higher)

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coloured and ordered by risk, Sized by number of workers in sector.

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OccuPations sized, sorted and coloured by risk

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Occupations sized and sorted by sector size, coloured by risk

Some cautionary notes come with this data:

• Risk profiles were actually collated from American workers, so difference in process and work-style could mean UK workers have a different profile.

• The risk profile was devised prior to COVID19 and doesn’t take account of any potential social distances or other safety approaches (e.g PPE) that may be applied to a given occupation. So, in some sense, the risk score indicates what degree of protection could be needed.

Archive of Virgin Trains' Press Release

Virgin Trains lays on a special surprise for young railway fan Edan

The press release about Edan’s adventure with Virgin Trains was live for all but 12 hours before the franchise was handed over and the content taken down.

I screen-shotted it at the time and just wanted to preserve it for him (and them) here:

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This is Chad Varah crossing the border (WH Auden's Night Mail updated)

Virgin Trains have well and truly touched our lives. When we had our son we knew we wanted to raise him closer to family in Scotland and it meant moving from the South East of England. The Virgin service on the West Coast Main Line was instrumental in enabling us to make that move while I continued to work remotely out of an HQ in London.

An amazing gift from Virgin Trains

Little did we know that our son would become so utterly devoted to the trains that made that upbringing possible. Virgin Trains gave him an incredible gift: the gift of inspiration and on 30th Nov 2019 they added to that gift with something quite amazing. (see here).

I thought that as a way to remember Virgin Train’s contribution to the West Coast Main Line, and to my son, I would attempt a a rewrite of W H Auden’s famous poem “Night Mail”.

It’s a wonderful, rhythmic poem that captures the essence of the Royal Mail train rushing North through the night to Glasgow. Over and above that it has a poignancy for us because it is essentially “local”.

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, 
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, 
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

And so it goes on…

Of course, those were the days of steam. In contrast, the staple express of the modern WCML has been the class 390 Virgin Pendolino.

I wanted the poem to be clearly “Virgin Pendolino” and to include a smattering of Pendolino names, since this is what’s really brought the trains alive for my son and indeed is at the heart of recent events.

So, without further ado:

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Pendolino

This is Chad Varah crossing the Border, 
Passengers happy, all is in order. 
"Welcome to Virgin!" says a voice in the sky,  
"Sit back, relax, this Scouseman can fly."   
Travelling for business, travelling for fun, 
Adventure with grandad, home to see Mum. 

 The shop’s in coach C for nibbles and snacks, 
Mustn’t get hungry while riding the tracks.  
Powering up Beattock, the motors are whirring, 
Past windmills and forest, the countryside’s stirring.  

“Rethink Mental Illness” or true “Virgin Glory”, 
Each one of these locos can tell their own story. 

Tunefully humming as she passes, 
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses,
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,  
Stare from bushes at her sleek streamlined  coaches. 
A farmhouse tilts by, where no one wakes,  
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.   

Dawn is behind us, in pours the sun, 
She descends towards Glasgow at over a ton. 
Scotland awaits her, there’s business to do, 
A Treaty of Union from City of Crewe.  

Edan always had a soft spot for Chad Varah (founder of the Samaritans)

People from England, those from afar, 
People asleep in the quiet zone car,  
Lego is scattered across the table, 
Passengers visiting aunty Mable. 
Travelling to weddings with invitations,  
To meet the team or visit relations,  
Interview prep for job applications,  
Off to the wilds to explore new sensations,  
Gossip and chatter from all the nations, 
Twitter and Facebook and all the views, 
The onboard Wi-fi delivering the news. 
Travelling to uncles and cousins and aunts, 
Heading to Scotland from somewhere in France.  
Sadness for some with lost ones to bear,  
Not sure what to say when the train gets there. 
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the snoring,  
The mobile phone guy and his heart’s outpouring,   
Tapping of laptops and tablets and phones,  
A palmful of pixels that everyone owns.  

Let’s Bee Together this memorable day 
Through mountains and cities, speeding our way. 

“To Scotland!” We say, “that’s where we’re going!” 
On Charles Rennie Mac with red silk a-flowing 

It’s better by train, we’d rather not drive, 
But what shall await us when we arrive?  
The hustle and bustle, the city’s heart beating,  
A handshake, a hug, a warm tender greeting.  

This journey is over, heads held with Pride. 
Passengers happy, thanks for the ride. 

(c) Nik Sargent 2019

A lifetime legacy of Virgin Trains

I’m going to have to admit something: it’s quite tricky typing with tears on the keyboard.

And the reason I have tears on the keyboard is I’m still trying to take in what Virgin Trains did for my son, Edan, at the weekend. I think in the world of any committed train enthusiast it counts as monumental.

Edan celebrates his love of Virgin Trains

For those who want the backstory you can read my open letter to Richard Branson here and an interim follow up here.

With just over a week left on the West Coast franchise, we knew that Virgin Trains were kindly organising a surprise for Edan, whose world revolves round trains and the West Coast Mainline.

It didn’t escape our attention that they needn’t have done anything. It would have been easy to do nothing, or send him a signed photo, or something quite low key.

But I suppose that is not the Virgin way. To say they knocked-it-out-of-the-park-and-then-some redefines the word understatement. They created a “once in a lifetime” experience for Edan that he will indeed remember for a lifetime. They literally handed over a part of their legacy that will keep their history alive and he will treasure it forever.

A magical weekend

The day started with a complimentary trip to Blackpool. (Well actually, the day started getting stuck at the entrance to the car park and then discovering there were damaged overhead lines just outside Carlisle. But fate was on our side and it didn’t end up sending our plan off the rails).

We rode on a Pendolino (390141 formerly City of Chester) to Preston and then changed onto a Super Voyager, which gave Edan the chance to explore the whole train and create another “Train Files”.

The trip to Blackpool involved a one-hour turn around during which time Darran, the local Train Driver Manager, spent the whole time showing Edan the ropes on 101 Squadron - the Super Voyager we rode there and back on.

He showed Edan practically everything there was to know about the train and how it operates, including what was behind all the secret cupboards! And he left him with a very treasured and special memento to take away.

We honestly thought, WOW, after that train experience and the chance to give a station announcement back at Carlisle, it’ll have been an amazing experience etched on his memory.

Little did we know what else was planned.

The Pendolino we travelled back to Carlisle on was in reverse car order (which was a first for all of us and pretty cool for an enthusiast like Edan) so when we stepped off, Edan ran back along the platform to see the name plate (of course!)

Being met at Carlisle

As he did so, we were met by a team of Virgin staff and a photographer who had been waiting for us at the other/normal end of the platform. They took photos and waved off a few trains before taking us to platform 4 to be presented with a gift. Amazingly we managed to keep Edan in our sights for once, because his usual modus operandi at Carlisle is to run round the platforms trying to see every single train!

I think it was at this point we were given some branded cookies and other goodies and I was already just overwhelmed at the generosity and warmth of the staff. Then we were asked to wait with the photographer while the Virgin team went off to get something else. I’ll be honest, I was thinking maybe they’d got a cake, or a model train or something.

It was then I saw them coming back down the platform trying to disguise-something-that-was-pretty-un-disguisable and realised what was happening.

I froze inside, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

There was a nameplate being brought down the platform. Onlookers were bemused. Other rail enthusiasts stopped in their tracks; one asked “What’s Happening!???”

Stuart - the photographer - readied himself; Katie on the Virgin team approached Edan as asked if he knew what it was? He knew. She asked what name he thought it was and turned it round to reveal CLIC Sargent. I just filled up inside, I could barely swallow or stem the flow of tears. This is how you reduce a grown man and doting Dad to a crumbling wreck, in case you ever wanted to know. Thankfully my creaking knees held out.

I have to help you understand just how momentous this gift was.

Edan is presented with the CLIC Sargent nameplate

During age 1 - 2 we lived right next to the West Coast mainline. Since age 3 Edan has been devoted to these trains and we’ve been devoted to travelling the length and breadth of the country to help him see them.

They are so intertwined with his existence and knowledge, it’s no word of a lie to say that by age 4 I was fully confident that if he’d ever got lost at Edinburgh Waverely station (which has 19 platforms) he’d have been able to find a train home to Carlisle or Dumfries entirely unaided.

Week after week after week, he has raced to stand in front of the nameplates and pose for pictures. Month after month he has braved the weather on platforms to see them race by and shout out the name, much to the bewilderment and bemusement of other travellers.

He has been so close to all these nameplates, both physically and in his heart, but never once has he touched one. They are a permanent fixture in his childhood but, despite the lure, never once has he crossed that forbidden yellow line.

These are valuable pieces of rail memorabilia and we know that some of these plates will go to raising money for charity. By my amateur calculations, this nameplate has travelled millions of miles - easily to the moon and back several times. The privilege granted to us by Virgin Trains is certainly not lost on us.

And there’s something else that I think even Virgin don’t know: CLIC Sargent is a charity, of which the Sargent half was, of course, founded in memory of Sir Malcolm Sargent, the musician and orchestral conductor. Although we don’t have the full family tree, to the best of our knowledge he is indeed a distant relative.

All of this is swirling in my head as the flashgun starts to fire and snaps me back to my senses.

We take some photos, Edan gets hugs from everyone and then head back to the office where he is allowed to make a platform announcement, toot the horn of a freight loco and is taught to dispatch it by Katie.

Of course, it’s not all over for Edan, he stays another hour on the freezing platform while all the hubbub dissipates and eventually it feels like we’re the only ones there! We’re quite used to that!

Finally, we leave; carrying a remarkable piece of history with us.

A million thanks won’t really cut it

I don’t really know where to begin with saying thank you. Also, I can hardly begin to imagine what strings were pulled to make this possible!

What I do know is that a lot of people - most of them behind the scenes - must have gone way above-and-beyond to make this happen; and they are forever going to be in our memory. (Let’s face it, we’re going to have a fairly substantial permanent reminder on the wall!)

We have to give a special mention to Darran (Driver Manager) and John (Driver) at Blackpool for showing Edan the ropes on the Voyager. We’d like to thank Katie and the team at Carlisle who treated us like part of the family (not forgetting Paul who let Edan take control of the station mic).

And at the beginning of all this is someone anonymous in the social media customer services team (one of whom is only known to me as ^BT), who took the effort to reply and say “leave it with us and we’ll see what we can do”.

Clearly this also couldn’t have happened without being masterminded by Laura from Corporate Affairs who we were delighted to meet at Carlisle. Laura: I don’t know how you did it but it was extraordinary.

You are all very special people.

History in our hands

This is indeed the end of an era, but also the end of a chapter. A new chapter begins on 8th December 2019 and it’s comforting to know that the staff of Virgin Trains (at least all the ones I spoke to) are hopeful and positive about their next chapter. Ever since its creation, the railway has always touched and transformed millions of lives.

Once again I thank the special folk at Virgin in the deepest and most heartfelt way possible and at the same time wish them the best of luck on the next leg of their journey.

And let’s be honest, we’ll still be seeing you on the platform most weekends!

Thank you for making a difference. Thanks a googol !!

Nik x

A heartfelt thank you - because I never once imagined this

Wow! What just happened?

Well, what just happened was that about 10 days ago I wrote (here) to thank Virgin Trains and Richard Branson for the impact they have had on my son, Edan (who is now 6 but has been a lifelong train enthusiast). I got a lovely reply from the brilliant customer service staff at Virgin:

Then I went away on business to London for a few days and had my head down in work and never checked twitter. Once I was on the train heading home (Virgin Pendolino 390037 as it happens - “Virgin Difference” - which is how I signed off my letter. Prophetic?) I decided to fire up tweetdeck and have a peek at twitter.

It didn’t take me long to realise something had happened!

The first thing that had happened was Virgin Trains had asked me to get back in touch - but alongside that, hundreds of people had liked and shared the correspondence, and many others had replied to me with heartwarming messages.

My train ride was 3.5 hours and it took me the whole journey to get through all the tweets!

What transpired over the next few days was quite breathtaking to me. We received so many messages of encouragement and solidarity.

I saw for myself that the “Rail Family” - those who have grown up on the railway, or work on the railway, or otherwise have a passion for it - really is a “thing” and it’s a warm, kind, welcoming family to boot; and that really brought a lump to my throat.

There was an outpouring of generosity including the offer of various “experiences” for Edan. Amongst these was the “chance of a lifetime” to see name plates being made by the supreme experts in the field. Frankly we were just completely bowled over.

We also had a note from Paul who produces “trip reports” on YouTube.

Edan has watched so many hours of his YouTube channel! He’s been there (virtually) with Paul on the first run of the Hitachi 800 in the UK; the first run of Eurostar from London to Amsterdam and so on.

Paul’s reports also inspired Edan to create some of his own videos in a similar vein and you can see his own “Train Files” in the video here from his latest trip, where he talks us through First Class on the Virgin Pendolino.

Our little man continues to cram in the trains.

Nothing can stop Edan’s passion for trains.

With under 2 weeks to go on the Virgin Franchise, last weekend he surprised me with a planned trip from our base in Scotland to Wigan to ride on a Voyager and Pendolino and do some more Virgin Trains spotting!

He’s never been to Wigan before but you can see from the video when he gets off the train it’s like releasing an animal back into the wild! 😂

We’ll do our best to find all the teachable moments in this…

When I wrote my original letter, it was just a heartfelt Thank You to Virgin about unseen consequences, yet it turned into something so much more!

IT’S Train Books OF SOME KIND most nights And Sleeping with VIRGIN train layouts next to his bed (Sorry, CAB)!!

I included the sunflower logo in my original letter and some readers will have understood why. We’re poignantly aware that there must be many “Edans” and young train lovers up and down the country, and he is lucky and privileged to have been on the receiving end of such kindness - which has been, and will be, a big learning experience for him.

As a measure of our gratitude to those that have extended their generosity to Edan, in turn we’ll be donating to Crisis, who do wonderful work looking after the homeless at Christmas (and all year).

And so, once again, our deepest, sincerest gratitude to everyone:

Thank you for inspiring,

Thank you for supporting,

Thank you for celebrating his world!

Thank

Trains Allow Edan to EXpress his personality!

Chasing Child, Chasing Train