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The Transdimensional Gas Station

Pretty sure I've been to that first one, the one near Lake Vyrnwy. That bend in the road looks extremely familiar. I really want to visit the one in Applecross now!
Applecross is a magical place - it's a minor coincidence you should mention it: just earlier this very day I was genuinely dreaming of going back there. Somewhere near there is an old RAF station - a 1940s radar base or something, or maybe a sonar listening post (was that even a thing? And if so, wouldn't it be more up the navy's, um, street?) - with a nice information board. I was struck by the recollections of a serviceman from Halifax (bear in mind that at the time I read it I was living in the Calder Valley) who had been stationed there during the war, commenting on the spooky atmosphere. I especially recall the detail that his NCOs - tough, no-nonsense Glaswegians, as he described them - would not readily go on-site at night.

I haven't been able to identify the exact site since* - you reach it by taking the road north round the coast from Applecross, rather than going back over the pass. Memory vaguely suggests it might have been co-located with a lighthouse (which was probably one of Robert Louis Stevenson's dad's - that's my other abiding trivia fact from the journey). I'd love for further illumination, if anyone can oblige?

* should I be ashamed to admit that I have made the attempt a few times, courtesy of Google Earth? ETA - God, I'm slow on the uptake -is this a transdimensional radar station to add to the gas stations of that ilk?
 
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UPDATE: I HAVE FOUND SOMETHING PROMISING

So today I travelled the road again but I came at it from a different direction. The co-ordinates posted by the original poster leave a google marker here: https://goo.gl/maps/BELpdWorzvJ2
The problem is that the town of Västra Harg (the starting point) is North-East of the marker and Mjölby is North-West of there (due North of the marker). Travelling from one to the other wouldn't take you anywhere near the marker.

I have previously travelled the road from Mjölby South-East to Västra Harg and then North again on to Sya and then West to Egeby.
I have also travelled Strålsnäs (just North of the marker) to Västra Harg and then on to Mjölby before. Today I took a route from Strålnäs towards Västra Harg but I turned off earlier and travelled a new road Northwards before travelling on to Mjölby. I found nothing at all.

But before I got to Strålnäs, I turned off the motorway (E4) and drove towards Ryckelsby to get to Strålsnäs. After just a short while, I found a building which looked promising. Here is the google marker.
https://goo.gl/maps/zHqdd7bi9j42

And the street view link: https://goo.gl/maps/VJz1GG8X26y

It looks like someone has used it as a garage. There are old cars outside and a peep through the window revealed tools and equipment still inside. The interesting thing is that there is a fuel tank on one side of the building, old cars left outside and further investigation showed signs of infrastructure underground. It doesn't match the exact description or location but it's the closest match for miles in any direction.

I snapped a few pics but they are too large for the server to handle (Only 2.4 MB each but they won't upload).
 
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There's a couple of old Volvos at the front - and if you flip to the other side of the road on Street View, there's a couple more. Probably the shed belongs to the same person who has the old Volvos on the opposite side of the road?
 
There's a couple of old Volvos at the front - and if you flip to the other side of the road on Street View, there's a couple more. Probably the shed belongs to the same person who has the old Volvos on the opposite side of the road?
There are Volvos everywhere, over there.
 
Yeah, but 1960s Volvos parked at the front - all that much?

Yep ... 1960's era Volvos were hard to kill. When I lived in Sweden almost all the passenger cars one ever saw were Volvos and Saabs.
 
I shrank Ringo's latest photos to post-able size ...

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There's no indication that it was a commercial operation as such.
I'm guessing (by the placement of the tank) that the tank was originally for oil-fired heating and it hasn't been used for quite some time.
Picture 2 shows some hatches that may hide another tank, perhaps for refuelling farm machinery. The surface pump has probably been removed long ago.
 
I was wondering if maybe there never was a commercial operation. Maybe it was just a man with a garage to tinker in? And that's why he was so puzzled when someone wanted to buy petrol. Hence the handwritten receipt. It may have been a garage which repaired cars and the petrol pump was just for their own use???
can you shrink/post all photos
These are the only ones I took yesterday and EnolaGaia kindly shrank them and posted them here. All the older photographs om my exploration (and of a different garage) are on Page 10, Post #287.
 
I was wondering if maybe there never was a commercial operation. Maybe it was just a man with a garage to tinker in? And that's why he was so puzzled when someone wanted to buy petrol. Hence the handwritten receipt. It may have been a garage which repaired cars and the petrol pump was just for their own use???
Reckon that's it.
 
Well, I'm absolutely gobsmacked - the Transdimensional Gas Station located at last! Fantastic detective work, Ringo.

I was a lurker on the old FTMB for about ten years, drawn into IHTM by this very thread while researching timeslip accounts for an OU course I was taking. I never, ever in my wildest dreams expected it to be resolved (or vindicated!).

All we need now is for Auroborous to come back and triumphantly announce he's finally found his receipt.
 
There's no indication that it was a commercial operation as such.
I'm guessing (by the placement of the tank) that the tank was originally for oil-fired heating and it hasn't been used for quite some time.
Picture 2 shows some hatches that may hide another tank, perhaps for refuelling farm machinery. The surface pump has probably been removed long ago.
i agree, it looks more like some guy's abandoned car stash
 
Well, I'm absolutely gobsmacked - the Transdimensional Gas Station located at last! Fantastic detective work, Ringo.

I was a lurker on the old FTMB for about ten years, drawn into IHTM by this very thread while researching timeslip accounts for an OU course I was taking. I never, ever in my wildest dreams expected it to be resolved (or vindicated!).

All we need now is for Auroborous to come back and triumphantly announce he's finally found his receipt.
Now that is unbelievable! The OU running a course on time slips ten years ago. That's really ahead of the game..
 
I was wondering if maybe there never was a commercial operation. Maybe it was just a man with a garage to tinker in? And that's why he was so puzzled when someone wanted to buy petrol. Hence the handwritten receipt. It may have been a garage which repaired cars and the petrol pump was just for their own use???

These are the only ones I took yesterday and EnolaGaia kindly shrank them and posted them here. All the older photographs om my exploration (and of a different garage) are on Page 10, Post #287.
my best tip would be on your next trip to the place, try to talk to one of the neighbours (i see some quite recent looking houses in google street view mere meters from your mystery shed)
if they don't know anything about that place, then i guess we have hit a dead end
 
thing is, in the original post auroborous finds the location where the gas station was, its wooded over, and speaks to the owners, to no avail ...

I were [sic], however, able to find out who owned that stretch of woods where I believe the station appeared to us. Sadly, this turned out to be another blank, as the family I talked with had never heard of any gas station anywhere along that road ...
 
Well, I'm absolutely gobsmacked - the Transdimensional Gas Station located at last! Fantastic detective work, Ringo.

Thanks for the kind words but I'm not sure that I've found it. This was just the geographically nearest best-fit.

But did you see the orange striped gas pump OP mentioned?

OP also mentioned "Set into the side of the shed was an open door and a large, grimy window".

Yeah (as I, I agree). There is a grimy window on each end of the building but no door. No orange pump but there was evidence of something having stood there before being removed. There were concrete foundations and hatches leading to underground pits. There is a thing in Sweden with people buying and restoring old Americal cars. Some even go so far as to have ESSO signs and TEXACO pumps in their front gardens to show that they are Petrol heads. There is a house with a kind of forecourt not a million miles away from there, where the owner has two renovated pick-up trucks, 2 petrol pumps and loads of oil/petrol signage in their front garden.

If somebody did have an old pump just standing around then they would have had numerous offer to sell it by now.

plus, doesnt the original account place the station on the other side of the road ?

Yeah that was a problem which I thought of straight away.

There are a few alternatives here:

The original poster made it all up based on his knowledge of the local area.
He confabulated a memory from various places and mixed up his exact location (as the co-ordinates would seem to suggest).
He encountered a Transdimensional Gas Station.

The road I did drive on last weekend (the kind of short cut missing out Västra Harg) seemed to match the original description very well. Patches of dense woods on either side interspursed with open areas. But there were no buildings that could even remotely match the description. The only thing that struck me was that there were houses and farms every minute or so. This part of the country is not so isolated. Should you run out of petrol then there are 3 or 4 houses within a 15 minute walk.
 
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This part of the country is not so isolated. Should you run out of petrol then there are 3 or 4 houses within a 15 minute walk.
how likely is it to have radically changed in the 20-something odd intervening years, very likely i would say ?
 
how likely is it to have radically changed in the 20-something odd intervening years, very likely i would say ?


Maybe. However, even in pleasant an thriving areas of town that one dilapidated old building, which nobody seems to know who owns it, can remain untouched for decades.
 
absolutely, but to the point in discussion, a abundance of houses to seek help when out of fuel now may well have been miles between dwellings in 91

I would find it hard to say really, henry. There were certainly some new looking/renovated houses but mostly well established farms and older buildings.

EDIT: Again, I don't think I've found it. This was just be nearest thing for miles around after doing now 4 trips along the road in question and surrounding areas.
 
@Carl Grove - my timeslips research was for a creative writing course assignment. Ironically, that's what I always supposed the Transdimensional Gas Station tale to be too: a piece of creative writing.
Oddly enough, if you look up what Wikipedia says about time slips, you will find them described there as a story line in books and films. Aside from demonstrating how hopeless Wikipedia is where such matters are concerned, maybe this explains the OU's odd take on the question. With around 500 cases so far on the record, you can no longer claim that time slips are "rare." Of course, even if this case hasn't been finally settled, it might have a different explanation.
 
My reading of the original story (several times) has the young fellows stopping at a gas station. Maybe not up to date, or like other gas stations they were used to, but they didn't think it odd until later. The description does not sound like anything other than a gas station to me. As I understand Ringo's last trip, this place might not even be on the same road, no matter what side of the road it was found on. I am very familiar with gas stations, old and new, and I don't see one in Ringo's photos.
 
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