Submitted by John Taylor, Horsham u3a
As a young engineer in 1962 I was living and working in Dusseldorf, while travelling to sites across Europe.
Towards the end of the year I was on a train from the Netherlands back to the Ruhr. A trip to the Netherlands was always welcome because of the easy availability of English newspapers. So I was catching up on all the news about the Cuban missile crisis when I was rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the train.
I awoke with a shock to an orange coloured sky. With my head full of the missile crisis I assumed the worst and my heart pounded. It turned out that I was passing through Duisburg and a blast furnace adjacent to the railway had vented its orange gases to the sky. The shock was such that the 60 year old memory is still one of my most vivid.