Hinckley, EN

I'm James, aged 24 and live in Hinckley Leicestershire. I was born in 1982 in the Foleshill area of Coventry. I first got into railways when I was 3 years old after a visit to Butlins in Minehead when I seen the West Somerset Railway in operation - from that moment on I was mesmerised. Soon, I started to spend my weekends at Tile Hill on the outskirts of Coventry, where we had a variety of traffic with Class 86's, 87's and 90's on passenger services as well as Class 47's and HST's on Cross Country diagrams. This was one of 6 locations where I'd visit, the other 5 were Coundon level crossing, Hawkesbury Lane level crossing (on the Coventry - Nuneaton line), Wheelwright Lane level crossing which linked the Coventry Colliery (Keresley) to the Coventry - Nuneaton line at Three Spires Junction, this line has since reopened to serve the Holbrooks Prologis Park which see's an "as required" service of bottled mineral water to and from Dollands Moor with an EWS Class 66 although a 67 has made a couple of appearances. The other locations I visited was Canley and Berkswell level crossings - both of which along with Tile Hill were abandoned in 2004 as apart of the West Coast modernisation project. Moving to Bedworth in 1995, I discovered Nuneaton station and also Tamworth, both of which still see's a wide variety of freight traffic. Bedworth itself also has a fuel terminal which see's a sometimes thrice weekly delivery of fuel from the Humber and Port Clarence oil refineries. A final move to Hinckley in 2003 and the Outwoods foot crossing was discovered Photographywise, I started with a basic 35mm camera in 1994, before moving onto APS format in 1998. This lasted until the summer of 2005 when I purchased my first digital camera - a Fuji Finepix E500 - from my local ASDA store in Hinckley, this was only shortlived when in December 2005 I purchased a Fuji Finepix S5600 which in my opinion is by far one of the best non-SLR camera's available