Goole By Train

My husband and fellow band partner Rich and I were invited, as part of our Open Bridges project, to produce photographs and art content about the renovation of the railway swing bridge over the Ouse at Goole. 

With this in mind we travelled both to and from Saltmarshe to Thorne, either side of Goole, and I made two videos and music which pass the legendary ‘Salt and Pepper Pot’ water towers in Goole.

The videos are both of the same stretch of track, so I decided to edit the footage, and record soundtracks to make them as different from each other as possible. 

The first video – ‘Another Train comes Anyway’ – is the journey from Thorne to Saltmarshe and is virtually black and white. For the song I wanted to tell the story of the journey using words that sound familiar and tell the tale, but aren’t real words or sentences in the English language. So, like the video, it’s real but not completely lifelike.

The second video – ‘Colourway 78’ – is the return journey, and I made it in very highly saturated colour. Similarly I wanted to make the music as different as possible, so the former is a relatively accessible song in 4/4 time. The latter ‘Colourway 78’ is a more off the wall instrumental in 7/8 time. I recorded and manipulated the sounds of the train on the tracks to create the rhythm track.

Words and music, live bass, vocals, programming, videos and artwork by Lou Duffy-Howard.

The tracks are released on my solo album ‘There and Back’ which comprises eleven experimental railway journey inspired songs, soundscapes and visuals. It is released on the DHM record label catalogue number DHM036 on all the usual digital platforms and on Bandcamp – click here. The videos are an integral part of each track, and the full playlist can be seen at this link: https://bit.ly/3UqfCiy.

Whilst Lou was taking the videos, I took some stills – in the gallery below – from the seat opposite on the same journeys to and fro’. The short journey took us over two rivers, the Ouse and the Dutch River, and the Knottingley and Goole Canal section of the Aire and Calder Navigation and then along the north bank of the Humber Estuary on the way home.

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