Week 18

Saturday at Toddington


Out with the gang on Saturday, and doing something interesting, other than measuring, at last. Of course we can't spend any money, not a penny. We never had  a specific COVID appeal, just one to cover half the cost of the Gotherington landslip, so we are paddling our own financial COVID canoe as it were. We are staying very prudent with expenditure. So when we do work on the PWay, it must cost nothing, and this was the case on Saturday.

The job on Saturday was to replace a bullhead half panel of rail by a flat bottomed one. The picture on the right shows the area in question, at the yard throat in Toddington, immediately south of the two turnouts we put in a couple of years ago (and still unused).

The job was raised by our S&T department, who had a simple request: can we have an insulated fishplate immediately north of the turnout you put in?

Knocking out the rails with jacks.

That doesn't sound too difficult, swapping a plain fishplate for an insulated one, does it?

But it was difficult. The joint in question was a transition from FB rail to Bullhead, and was to be insulated. That is a very special, one off set of fishplates, and would cost £1000s. Our cheap as chips solution to this was to replace the next panel of track with more FB rail, instead of the BH rail that was there now. That way we could use a plain FB set of insulated fishplates, which we had in stock.

Digging out the cribs by hand.

The maximum gang size we are allowed was 6, so already you are not well equipped with labour. On top of that, two senior members spent the morning at a meeting, leaving just 4 of us, mostly over 70, to do the hard work.

With all the lockdowns and little physical labour allowed on the gang so far, we were badly out of condition, so this point motor, newly installed, was used as a handy seat for a reviving cup of caffeine.

We got the 9 concrete BH sleepers out and dug out the 9 cribs. They have to be completely free of ballast, otherwise the replacement FB sleeper will ride high and you won't get the rail in. We weren't very happy with this result, the cribs didn't look wide enough. But if we made them any wider, then they would be joining up and in practice you'd be hand digging out the whole area.

Our saviour, as so often, was Stevie. He suggested putting the bucket on the Telehandler (his trusty JCB was off site) and in just a few minutes he scooped out the whole panel, doing in minutes what we had tried to do the whole morning.

With a bed now clean of ballast, the new sleepers with PAN base plates for FB rail were easily laid in.

There were just 9 to the next joint (this end of the yard is very old, and has some mixed bag quality stuff in it) so we were soon lining them up, ready to receive a length of FB rail. The transition to Bullhead rail would then be the next joint, and we could just move the existing transition fishplates along a bit.

A after careful measuring (with a tape measure which yours truly felt was rather stretchy, but hey, it's in our kit) Steve cut the FB rail to fit the gap. Remembering the two expansion gaps, and also the slice of insulation (aka as an end post) that goes between the rails on an insulated fishplate)

Dave had the pleasant job of cutting the new holes for the bolts.

Pandrols have been laid out in readiness for clipping up, but first of all we need to fit the fishplates, which might involve moving the newly cut rail back and forth a bit.

What now......?

And there we have it, the plates are on at the other end, but at this end there is a gap. It's too wide to get both sets of plates in, one of them will have to be fitted with just two bolts, or 'fly fished' as we like to call it.

Watch this space on how we overcame the gap. It's a thrilling serial, this PWay stuff, isn't it!





Monday at Broadway


First of all a blow up for you of the re-opening notice on the door of the booking office:

To recap, we are opening from Saturday August 15th, you need to book on line, and journeys start/finish at Toddington, nowhere else for the time being. Got that? So good to see that trains will be running again, and we need to start earning money again. If there are lots of passengers, we might increase the frequency of the trains too. This is a toe in the water, so we hope you will come. And there will be steam!




Back to Broadway activities, we had a fun day building a little stone wall to sort out the situation round this forecourt lamp post, which is too high (after the lamp post was put in at a certain level, it was decided to have a lower forecourt in order to achieve a kerb by the building and minimise the risk of water flowing into the booking office).








We thought the neatest way of boxing it off would be with a row of second hand imperial engineering blues, then to back fill with some pea gravel.

Here is Tony just finishing off the brick laying, leaving a few more blues for a second lamp post, which is also not quite finished around the base.








Tony's gone for a break here, so we can show you what the little wall looks like. It'll look better once the mortar has gone off, and the pea gravel has been filled in around the post and along the front.

This is the other post that needs sorting out around the front. It's also too high, its black octagonal base should be below ground.

The concrete block bin store is something we will need to disguise a bit. We had it planned on a strip of land near the top of the drive, away from the 1904 heritage area, but it was not to be.

During the day we had a visitor from another railway. He was very complimentary about the build of the station (theirs is just a gleam in their eye for the moment) and we were happy to help with tips and sources for all the interesting bits of kit that makes a station look authentic.

He took a great interest in the recently restored platform trolley....

Talking of bits of kit that make a station look authentic, we have just acquired this:


It's a set of GWR 'IN' and 'OUT' plates in cast iron. The beer bottle is to give an idea of the size.

You need to look ahead for this sort of stuff, because it never comes up on the day you need it. We follow various auctions and from time to time something interesting comes up, and we try to secure it for Broadway.

But this set is actually due for Toddington, for the day - delayed by COVID - that the shop moves to bigger premises, and the old booking office and first class waiting room can be reinstated to their 1905 glory.




This is what they would look like in situ. Notice the crowd barrier posts, very topical these days with all the one way COVID systems in place.

We already have a set of these, they're just waiting for some workshop time to remove the damage inflicted when they were bulldozed off their bases.






Given that we now have a set of IN and OUTs, we have a spare OUT in store that is now for sale. It's an original, and we used it, through a little foundry we know, to make a replica of itself and an extra IN, both of which are now in use at Broadway.

This is the spare plate then:

 If you are interested in buying it (and so boost our heritage funds a little) drop us a line at breva2011 (at) hotmail.co.uk.




Wednesday at Winchcombe.


Things are almost back to normal (although work on the Usk building continues to be banned) because today we had - two boxes of doughnuts! Result !!!

These are the slightly higher quality ones from Morrisons (for doughnut afficionados) and they went down a treat. Although we don't currently use our mess coach, so there was no tea to go with them. That tea is essential actually...

In the absence of meeting in the mess coach, we met outside it. As it was quite a large gang today (welcome back, several well known faces!) and we had to keep well apart, we stood in a large circle. Robert read us - not the riot act, no - a list of tasks for the day and this allowed us to split into several smaller groups.

One group set off to grease the breathers on opposite ends of the Broadway - Stanway CWR section, and important requirement during the hotter summer days.

Another group went to complete ballast shoveling and boxing in at the viaduct, a job started last week which follows on from the winter works there.

The third group remained at Winchcombe and sorted out a large pile of CWR rollers, with a future job in mind.

As the rollers are just bare steel and reside outdoors, they tend to go rusty and seize up. The job was to count them all, and to make sure they worked. Many did not, so there was much banging and shaking, and dipping in diesel oil.

Success though, the number was quite high!


More on this job when plans firm up. And there's a salvage mission on Saturday, which is also currently under wraps.

Watch this space...