Day 3 at Usk

A good crew headed out to Usk today, 68 miles away. There were 9 of us and 15 doughnuts, so a few to spare for tea later on. Such luxury.

After the long drive the first thing to do is get our vacuum flasks out, drink coffee and chew the cud. Or doughnuts. The latter was preferred it seems. Take one, go on !

Then to set up the scaffolding towers. It's a bit tricky to get them more or less level, we had to dig a hole here. Mike scrapes out the hole while Clive holds up the scaffolding tower.

Paul made up a measuring stick at home, cleverly foldable into two so that it fitted into the boot of the car.

Having worked out the inside floor level, he marked off the quoins on the stick. This will help him rebuild the stone structure when we get it back to Winchcombe.

Our building seems to have sunk into the ground, as at least two levels are below ground. The probable reason for this is that the earth around it has been piled up with debris over the years.

With two scaffolding towers in place we started removing more courses. Here Paul is working over the door, and has just exposed the lintel above it.

This is the lintel, now out on the ground. It is very heavy and appears to be made of oak. It is in good condition, except for a fair bit of decay at one end, so probably not usable again unless we have a narrower door.

With the lintel removed, the top of the door frame was exposed. Again, this was in good condition, except for decay - at the bottom.

That white post on the corner there is made of two lengths of Barlow rail, back to back. A piece of railway history in itself. Barlow rail was an attempt to simplify track laying, but it didn't really work, so the rails were lifted again and used for other purposes, like this.

Mid morning the building was down a bit further, and a delivery of further pallets was made, sent by the kind property owner who donated the hut to us. It came in the white van in the corner there.

Having removed the lintel over the door, Paul moved over to the small window on the Southern side, the one with the lintel that had failed. There were some blocks on it at a crazy angle, and these were removed and put on the pallet marked 'S'. We have pallets marked with the 4 faces of the building, and are stacking the stones  accordingly.

The stones around the lintel had one interesting feature - a stone with the corner carved out, to accept the lintel on one side. Paul shows us what this looked like, we'll have to put that one aside.

Here's a shot across the building a bit before lunch time. By now we had two groups working on removing courses of dressed stone, and pushing the undressed stone (the majority) into the inside. From here we will be heaping the undressed stone either into dumpy bags, or pallets with wooden frames. We need to check this out first. We have a tiny budget for the whole job, so need to be careful with our very limited funds.

The next interesting bit was this quoin, the biggest we have come across so far. It's too big for one man, or even four.
To get the big quoin down without damage we built a tower of pallets and rolled it down onto the top one. Then we rolled it on to a panel of scaffolding planks.

Very gingerly we pulled out the panel of scaffolding planks, with the heavy quoin on it.

Bit by bit more men were added, until we were six. Then we slowly carried the whole thing over to the pallet with the quoins on it.

An operation perfectly executed !

Below it was another big quoin, but slightly smaller. The same MO was used, but with only 4 men needed to carry it.

Behind you can see that the wall has come down to chest height in the meantime, we are doing well.

Then it was lunch time. The burger van did good business today. Thank you, men from the GWSR!

Paul had a speciality - a sandwich filled with chips and Marmite. Bon Appetit !

Dave had a stone in his shoe, but soldiered on bravely until work stopped. An extra merit mark for him.

After lunch we returned to the building to find this scene. The walls have come down in a major way, but a large part of the volume is rubble mixed with mortar, and this has been thrown into the centre of the building, from which we will need to remove it again. No doubt a large part of next week's work will be to recover the coarse stone, because we will need something like it to rebuild the inner part of the wall back at Winchombe.

An interim review of where we are with stacked pallets. Our kind landowner and building donor is also providing free transport back to Winchcombe, which is a major saving for us. Instructions are to stack the pallets in pyramid form, maximum one tonne each. We took this very seriously, and a lot of back of the envelope reckoning was done to establish the weight of what we put on each pallet.

After lunch we addressed the NE corner. It suddenly struck us that with several people still eating, the bulk of the job was being done by the project leader and two former bankers. So they are not so work shy after all, bless them. We are human beings, just mean with our lending money. We get a lot of ribbing hereabouts.

A heritage supporter at Toddington has expressed an interest in recovering (as much as possible of) the weighing mechanism. We will do our best.

The mechanism is firmly bolted to the floor, and once the inside has been cleared we will cut these off to release the cast iron tower. Check out the inscription on the cast iron, with the royal coat of arms.

As we come to the end of the afternoon the building starts to look really low. We no longer need any scaffolding, so that can be returned next week. The door is starting to stick out over there.

As there is now a lot of rubble inside the building, the door can no longer be opened. A shame, as it appears to be part of an 'air con system'.

At the end of the day the building looked really low, we made great progress today. Not only did we have 2 more volunteers than last week, there was a rain shower before we started and, at least for something over half the day, there was no dust. Then the sun came out again, damn it.

Here we are with work just stopped for the day, and putting the scaffolding tower parts back into the secure compound of our friendly neighbour.

This is what was left at the end of the day. All of the facades are well down, certainly so far that we can just work at them from ground level. There are of course two more courses, and a foundation, out of sight below ground, and the floor to take up.

We also shrink wrapped 4 more pallets, which have reached their maximum height and which are ready to go. The lorry can take 12, so this will be reached in 2 weeks time. Other pallets are half filled, scattered around according to their function.







History corner:

This week's history picture is of the river bridge leading into the former station:

It's quite a big structure, double track and leading not only over the river Usk but also a small riverside road at the far end. At the near end (behind the camera) is another road - that's the one you saw last week, next to the goods yard entrance. Usk station site is in the trees at the back, it's all overgrown except for a narrow path leading to the tunnel mouth.

The bridge has an outline of an oval works plate, but it's long gone.

This is what you can see of the river, looking over the side towards the town. On the right is a little flood plain, popular with picnickers today, and two people were putting on neoprene suits for an exploratory paddle in this shallow river.

Something else of interest is this aerial picture of the goods yard:

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/archive/6423055/details/504

At the top you can see the weighbridge by the yard entrance. This end of the goods shed is where the corrugated iron shelter, now at Hayles, was once located. You can't see it on the picture, as it wasn't there in 1948. It came from somewhere else, but we don't know where. That bit, the true origin of the GWR shelter at Hayles, is a mystery, unless someone knows?

Finally, we have a little computer generated layout of the future location of the weighbridge hut for you, where it will stand at Winchcombe. Alex of C&W did it for us, he is a chap with many talents!

This mock up gives you an idea of what we intend to do with the old weighbridge hut. It will stand at the Toddington end of P2 by the oak tree, on its own little goods platform. Don't worry that the building here doesn't look like it, it's a stock building from the computer. The tree has also been moved back a bit, but you get the idea. There will be some goods vehicles in front, some barrows, barrels etc and some signage such as COAL OFFICE or GOODS OFFICE. People will be able to wander down from P2 to see it. Beyond is a site that could hold a turntable, that's only a germ of an idea at the moment.