Bad weather, and welcome to 2025.

First one this year.

We start the year off with an icy Saturday, and a lot of heavy digging and lugging kit.

First it was synchronised starting of your engines.

Here Nick and Chris pull away, with Easy Start within easy reach.

The job was to replace several timbers at Gotherington on the north end of the loop.

Donuts eaten - what shall we do next?

 

 

 

This required an awful lot of kit, it completely filled the white tipper Transit. You don't want to have to go back for one missing item.

We entered at Skew Bridge, and reversed down the line, through the tight confines of Gotherington station platform. 11 replacement timbers awaited us, a large ask.

The yellow cross in the foreground marks the first timber to be replaced.

 

 

This timber didn't look to bad, but the impacted chair allows you to suspect that the wood inside has gone soft.

And it was true, this timber was falling apart. It was laid, second hand, thirty years ago in the 1990s.

The first timber wasn't too long, but already very heavy. Hard to hift for one person, so Leigh was helping with a bar from behind. Other members of the gang are already starting on the second and third timbers marked with a cross.

The replacements are also second hand, but in hardwood and with a lot of life left in them. We don't use concrete in turnouts.

To stop water getting in and rotting them later we plug the holes with spiles.

Jim taps them down, then they are sawn off.

The worst job on timber replacement is the digging out. Not too bad if the ballast is of a modest size, but at Gotherington the ballast was slightly larger than usual (it was cheaper to buy in those days) and that made the shovelling very difficult.

Margaret here was very courageous, and had a good go at it.

On the lawn at privately owned Gotherington station are these two old agricultural wagons. The owner has mentioned in the past that if someone was willing to take them on for restoration, he might be willing to let them go.

Later in the day we got to the sixth timber. This was the longest so far, at 13'6'', but there are longer ones still that need changing. 

Although it looks quite skinny - a lot of it was left behind in the bed - it still took 8 of us on 4 sets of nips to move it to the pile.

This is where it was. The further up the turnout you go, the more digging there is. And there were three in a row to do here.

We had possession of the line, as trains were running from Winchcombe to Broadway on Saturday.

Interestingly, Mrs. Blogger, stationmaster at Winchcombe on New Year's Day, reported a heavy stream of passengers. That's unusual at Winchcombe. It turns out that they were actually using the railway for public transport, to go to the Cheltenham races ! That's nice.

That 13'6'' timber was replaced by a similar one from the pile, which still had five left to do on another day.

 

 

During Saturday then we changed 6 timbers at Gotherington, with five more to go.

This is the pile of rotten ones, with some debris to one side. They still need lifting on to a truck and taking back to base.

We had a good sense of achievement at the end of the day.

Usketeers in the weighbridge.

Minus 1.5 degrees this Wednesday morning, so no brick laying possible. Instead, we concentrated on making the position of the second pier ready for its construction.

On arrival we were met by a team from C&M who were shovelling the extracted material from the underpinning hole into the Telehandler. That was very welcome news, as it made the site a lot tidier. 

We know the excavated material weighed 1.2 tons, as we saw it on the scales.... 

 

We got to work once the Telehandler had left (it was needed at Hayles, where the big PWAY winter relay started today).

You can see the pier we built last time on the right. A second pier is needed on the left, but its position is on the end of one of the former pit walls and that is very rough. So to get a flat wall against which the pier can be built we cut the jagged ends of the protruding bricks off. These, we think, are remains of the original 1905 weighbridge pit, which was enlarged in 1945, and the outside area completely reconstructed.

At the same time we removed the rendering from the RSJ that supported the facade above. It was all quite rusty in there. It's not clear what is old here (1905) and what is later (1945 upgrade).

 

During a pause in the proceedings we had a quick walk around the site.

This traffic island is unattractive. Mostly made of concrete kerbs, one end is not, but made of smaller pieces of left over Monmouth Troy pink stonework. As it happens, there are two pieces of concrete kerbing in the yard which exactly fit this spot, after which the top surface could be levelled off again.

The FoWS also expressed an earlier wish for a GWR lamp post here, as there was one to be seen in 1905 photographs. 

The whole gate with fence is an unattractive welcome fo our visitors. The original wooden gates to the goods yard (today's main entrance) have gone, and a larger modern steel agricultural gate bodged on to the two remaining GWR cast gate posts has been hung. The original open access to the station forecourt has been closed off with a rickety removable picket fence, which was recently hung with modern aluminium signage. 

There must be an imaginative way to make this area more like the museum we say we are, without compromising the requirements of site security against unauthorised campers.

Chainsaws could be heard near the road bridge. This came from the tree surgeons who were cutting down more pine trees deemed unsafe.

After cleaning up the uneven wall of the pit we took a look at the RSJ (or RSJs?) that were holding up the front wall of the building.

This is a shot from underneath, showing two fairly thin and well rusted steel beams.

 

However, if you looked at the north end, you could see that one beam was shorter than the other, and did not seem to be supported at the end where the old wall came out.

Strange.

Note also the stirrup, into which the heavy beam from the weighbridge table engages. This links up with the scales immediately above, with a very long leverage effect.

A close up of the shortened of the two RSJs. Seems to end in mid air.

We will look into all this next time, when our colleagues from C&M are back from their distant Christmas holidays.

A final look at the end of the day. We cleaned the rubble from the pit, and then passed Paul a selection of blues, for the second pier. We expect to build that next time.

Absent friends.

Locomotives come and go - ED 73 129 left, and BETTON GRANGE is coming to stay with us, as its new home.

One Western class absent from the GWSR is the class 14, yet we once had three of them! We have pictures of them from a number of sources, but never all three in the same photograph, so it's a bit hard to distinguish between them.

Picture by Steve Hill

Take these two at Toddington, neither of which carries a number. One has a red buffer beam.

This is the site of the future loco shed, with the unloading road in the foreground.

Picture by Steve Hill

Picture by Steve Baker

 

This one was taken at the same time, and shows the other 14 in front of it. It has a yellow buffer beam, and yellow rods.

 

 

 

This scan of an old photograph has a date - 14th April 1984, so in the very earliest days. It's D 9537, and has yellow buffer beams and unpainted rods.

That pull along trolley on the left is still in use today, and has played a vital role in the manufacture of the Broadway P2 canopy.

This one shows a proud moment, as the GWSR PWay gang, supported by one from the Mid Hants (LH side), reaches the northern mouth of Greet tunnel. John Lees took the picture in April 1986.

The loco is D9537, and it has a yellow buffer beam.

Picture by Steve Hill

 

In the late 1980s, early 1990s the railway used the class 14s quite a bit, not only on the PWay trains.

Here's 9537 arriving at Toddington with a 'Cotswolds Rambler'. These ran to Winchcombe and back.

Picture by John Lees.

 

This one is a fine study of the same locomotive, D 9537. It now sports rather fine cast number plates and BR emblems.

Picture by John Lees.

 

 

 

 

 

In what is probably an earlier picture - no cast number plates yet - we have D9537 pushing the first carriage to be restored into the converted goods shed at Winchcombe, after the necessary sidings outside had been laid by the PWay gang. 

That day of jubilation was in March 1989.

Coll J. Roesen

Here we have a different 14 - D 9539 It's the one with the red buffer beams.

This was taken on the 'main line' next to the goods shed, with a bogie flat and sleepers for a track extension.

Long time stalwart, digger and crawler crane drive Ivor is at the controls.

This one also has cast number plates and BR insignia.

Picture by Paul Fuller

Here's the same locomotive at the head of a train to Cheltenham Racecourse. The date was 8th March 2003.

Picture by Paul Fuller.

 

The most recent photograph in our records is this one. It shows the same D 9539 with a service train at Winchcombe, and the date was 21st May 2005.

There's been some change here... remember when Winchcombe was painted Midland red? The modest wooden 'Elf Centre' was replaced with an enormous Bradstone and plastic visitor centre, at the expense of two of the lamp posts. The other two in the picture were non-railway, and were replaced with GWR examples donated by members.

The last picture was taken by Yours Truly in July 1985, over on annual leave from Hong Kong. There was no inkling at the time that one day we would live and work here! On the day it was just 'a look over the fence' on the way to Ross on Wye for a holiday, stopping also for a photograph of Broadway. One day maybe, we thought...

Here we can see two class 14s, and an 08 shunter. The middle one is D9539, the nearest possibly D9537.

The third class 14 on that day was stabled outside the goods shed.

We have no photographs of the third one with an actual number, but thanks to Martin Loader - see link below - we can ascertain that it was D 9553.

 

http://www.hondawanderer.com/D9539_9553_Winchcombe_1992.htm

So what happened to them all? Here's the gen:

D 9537  Now at the EVR

D 9539  Now at the Ribble Steam Railway

D 9553  Stored at the Vale of Berkeley Railway.

56 were produced at Swindon between 1964 and 1965. 19 are preserved, (one third, a high percentage!), 5 were exported and 32 were scrapped. (Source: Wikipedia)

Work at Broadway.

This is currently on hold, due to the cold weather, and trains being operated into the station. For brick laying we need a reliable 3 degrees above zero, including overnight, which is not the case at the moment. 

Thanks to Steve of the P&O group we have a couple of wagon transport pictures for you.

 

They were emptied last Thursday by the grab lorry, and on Monday morning they were taken back to Broadway by the Toddington yard shunter.

The weather was absolutely foul on Sunday evening. There was heavy rain, followed by snow overnight, then more rain.

In the pictures - here at the Stanton B4632 overbridge - you can see the enormous run off this created.

 

This week it's very cold then, and on top of that we have the start of the Didbrook 2 relay on Wednesday. Any Broadway digging is likely to be the following week then.