The next project.
It looks like a quiet week this time.
We had a rainy day end of last week, then a stormy day, a family weekend, and Tuesday some necessary repairs to the car.
Monday though was ideal for brick laying. Neal was back from buying a compressor, and joined us in the morning. He reported that last week he had also spent a day painting dagger boards at Toddington.
Now that John has reached the top course of plain bricks at the back, it's time for a course of corbel bricks. To allow these to turn the corner - they go right round the building - there's a special big square corbel brick that goes on each corner.
In this picture you can see it on, with two of the normal corbel bricks joining it.
John also added to the north wall to make this possible - see the darker mortar.
In the picture John is already pointing his work, which was also slower, he reported.
Rumours dept:
- We are looking for a full time S&T department head. The previous one has retired.
- Our Baguley Drewry rail car is said to be for sale. That was the news earlier in the week.
Then we heard today that not only was the rumour true, but that it had already been sold. For a very modest sum too.
The sale was seen as rather hasty by many volunteers, who would have liked the chance to make a bid, and have it stay on the railway.
It's going to the P&B Railway.
There's a film of it here at Broadway in 2018, if you are interested:
- We have been offered a parachute style water tower. It's not complete, but within our competency to refurb/complete it. Recovery is scheduled for later in the month - watch these pages, as Yours Truly has been volunteered to help...
- We've had an offer to reinstate the Broadway station approach gate posts. These were ripped out prior to the Broadway re-opening, and not replaced, despite a plea from Yours Truly. They were then taken to CRC. The replacement posts on offer are originals from the line - they used to be at Earlswood lakes. Should we do it then?
Broadway camera: Out of action, since the storm. Unable to fix the issue, dismantling showed a camera body filled with ladybirds. Did they stop it? On Wednesday it was back on line, much to the relief of many.
Wednesday with the Usketeers.
A busy day, with lots going on, and tidbits of news reaching our ears, so interesting as well.
The day started with the arrival of two coach loads of 'wartime evacuees'. The one on the right was the biggest coach we've ever seen - 15m long, 15 tons weight, and room for 71 on board.
It had some difficulty in performing this 3 point turn, which turned into a 10 point one.
Our entrance canopy leads a miraculous life, with all these manoeuvres going on around it.
The railway was ready for the huge influx.
One of the most popular activities for the children is working these stirrup pumps.
We used to have just the one, but now there are three, waiting for their eager customers. Unfortunately we are not allowed to photograph that.
After coffee and a dome nut - sorry, did we say doughnut - Paul trimmed off the two longer studs at the base of the lamp post that we planted.
Here is one of the dome nuts. We felt this gave a better looking finish to the base.
As we mentioned last time, this lamp post is a late model, and is mounted on a concrete base with studs and nuts on top.
Yours Truly sponsored a bag of dome nuts to finish the job. Hope you like it.
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| Five men inspect a hole in the ground... |
We then had a quick chat with the C&M guys, who are preparing a consolidation repair on the southern part of the P1 platform, which has suffered from a sudden bout of subsidence. This will be dug out and professionally re-tarmacced next month. A bit of left over tarmac will go in front of the weighbridge, to finish that area off.
With the lamp post sorted (as far as our involvement stretched) we returned to the weighbridge, and started looking at the window. Paul is an adept carpenter, so this sort of job is right up his street.
The window, we think, is a 1905 original, with two sliding parts, and a fixed centre. Over the years the sliding parts have been disused, and in an effort to keep out the rain, they have been heavily painted over. Their closure mechanisms are missing, although traces remain. Unlike that on the Usk hut, the windows do not use rollers, but simply slide, wood on wood. The weak point is the bottom, where water gathers and here there is a lot of rot. The upper parts of the window are not bad.
As you can see in this picture, the mechanism placed in 1945 that Paul is leaning on is much larger than before, and prohibits an easy approach of the windows. It is likely that this is when the sliding parts fell out of use, and the weighbridge operator simply exited the building, if he wanted to talk to the driver that was being weighed.
Today's job was to loosen everything, so that the windows can be repaired one by one. It took us ages to get the fixed, middle one out, as it was secured by hidden nails, and of course we didn't know where they were.
To give you an idea of the extent of the job, here is the corner of one of the windows. We don't really have a budget for this, so we'll have to see on the day how we pay for the new (hard?) wood.
After lunch we went to do a bit of a survey of our next Usketeer project.
This is the construction of a sleeper built platelayer's hut, on the approach to the Winchcombe side of Greet tunnel. We chose this site because it's walkable from Winchcombe, has an existing concrete block base, and would appear in photographs of trains emerging from the tunnel. We have a design, so now we need to calculate the number of sleepers involved.
There's not much to see yet, as it's rather overgrown. The site is one of a number of concrete block bases we've seen along the Honeybourne line, so that makes it ideal for the rebuild project.
We have asked the Lineside Clearance guys to brush cut the site, so that we can make a start. There's a tree stump in the middle, so that could be a problem.
Recent PWay activity.
During the rather successful Rail 200 weekend on the GWSR the PWay dept was one of a number of departments who had representative stands out.
This was done to raise general interest in what volunteers on the railway do, and perhaps interest one or two potential new recruits to join us.
If you look closely, you can see not only one of the new Milwaukee electric tools (the 'pogo stick') but also a screw type track jack, such as used in the very first days of the railway at the beginning of the last century. This was lent to us by the Railway Archiving Trust. They have this sort of thing. We, as professionals, have had to move on and tend to use hydraulic ones, although they are not nearly as reliable, we have found.
Last Wednesday was nice and sunny, and saw the gang on the Broadway extension, where we have had to make repeated visits due to shrinkage following the extensive dry weather.
The Robels make packing so much easier and faster, but that just means that we get more than one job to do.
Here all four of the ones that we have are in use.
This work used to be done with beaters - a sort of pickaxe. That was awful, terribly sapping.
This old relic is down near Stanton yard. Wonder if the Worcester exchange telephone number still works?
The PWay pictures are by Paul, with thanks. He caught the class 47 at Broadway, across some decorative ironworks that make our railway so homely.
If you have potential replacement posts for the Broadway station approach gate posts which are originals from the line, you should definitely put them back! (Although you might want to emplace them slightly further in/back from the position of the originals which used to be there, to reduce the chance of some un-careful motorist running into them! Without careful comparison with an archive photo, I don't expect anyone will realize they've been moved a bit!)
ReplyDeleteYou are quite right.
ReplyDeleteThe sad story of the original gate posts is that a brand new pair of wooden gates was commissioned for them, and hung in about 2011.
During the station build, a number of vehicles grazed the open gates, and it was decided to take them down for safe keeping, until the construction traffic had finished.
As the drive was being refurbished, the previous management decided to uproot the old gate posts, as they were too close to the road, and would have made it difficult for, say, buses to enter.
We concurred, but asked to re-position the posts a little further up the drive. This was refused. Instead, the posts were used in a non-authentic setting at CRC.
The newly manufactured and sponsored wooden gates were then cut into pieces and re-used around the Bradstone visitor centre in Winchcombe.
The replacement posts do need to be positioned higher up the drive, because the turn in to the station approach is regularly used by overheight lorries that manage to stop short of our restricted height rail over road bridge, to do a three point turn and go back to where they came from.
The new wooden gates, sponsored for a second time, are not intended to ever be closed, as the station approach is shared with other local residents. They would just be decorative. Without the gate reinstatement the station approach looks rather bare.