Day 6 at Usk

A lovely day today, bright sunshine, not too hot, nine Usketeers met to drink coffee, yak, and eat doughnuts. What a great start to the day.

And special doughnuts too. These were offered by John, as supporter who came along with these Welsh ones.

Dragon flavour, anyone?

With the mortar getting tougher and tougher as we near the ground, we brought an even bigger SDS drill along. Here is project leader Dave giving the southern side a good going over. It's now hard to see the walls, with all the mortar piled up on top. And yet there are two more courses under all that.

Paul picked this corner, which had a huge quoin. Paul, a former builder, always brings a vast quantity of tools. In fact, your blogger's tyre pressures have had to be increased to cope with the extra weight. As per label in the door we are now on Human being+human being+human being+ human being and suitcase+suitcase+suitcase + suitcase+suitcase, except the latter is replaced by buckets of tools, rucksacks, iron bars, a shovel, a mattock, lump hammers etc etc etc. Not forgetting warm doughnuts, which got rather tepid this morning as the taxi service was considerably delayed by schools traffic, and a poorly signed road closure on the Childswickham road.

When the big quoin was eventually coaxed out of its bed it took four of us - half the workforce - to move it about the site, using the rope trick we developed last time.

Here it is being tipped on to the pallet. We made a concerted effort to complete filling the half filled pallets so far, so that they can be taken away by the next lorry visit. That's now scheduled for next Wednesday.

On the northern side - that's the one where the big window overlooking the weighing apparatus was - Peter and Mike dug down and then revealed a slab of concrete in front of the building. As this was hindering the recovery of the stones along that side, they hacked it out. It wasn't actually that hard.

Nonetheless it was felt we were allowed a little pause. As you can see from the full wheelbarrow in front, we continued shoveling at the huge pile of rubble within the walls, in an effort to expose the flagstones that made up the floor.

Mike was on the second, smaller SDS drill and spent the day in the window area where the cast iron column used to stand. What would be underneath it? There must be some sort of crawl space to the underside of the weighing table, where the levers run.

Mike also found this interesting brick. Although we had never heard of it (all those on the GWSR are by Redbank) Mike advised that the brickworks was only just down the road, which made sense. http://www.industrialgwent.co.uk/g11-eastmon/index.htm#pontypool
According to this site, the name Little Mill Brick dates from after 1910, so how it came to be amongst the rubble is a bit of  mystery for us. There were several of them, all broken.

In this picture Bob and Peter can be seen almost half way across the floor area, and with quite an expanse of slabs underneath.
All the larger bits of stone are being picked out and put in the palletised boxes, while the rubble is tipped nearby, ready to be pushed back into the hole when we leave.

With lunch time coming up, Jim started writing down orders for Kelvin, the burger van man.

Seven of us are faithful customers, supplementing the healthy but meagre salads provided by our well meaning spouses.

Dessert was an ice cream cone each!

After a polite 10 minute wait we sauntered up to the burger van to see if our food was ready. It wasn't. The burger van was very popular, and complete meals were being taken away. Patience then.

The rest of the gang beavered away in the background, overlooked by the original GWR goods shed that is still there, fully intact. It's almost exactly the same as the several ones on the GWSR.

After lunch we needed a round of drinks, as the sun was still hot enough to make you thirsty. This is almost all of the gang today: Julian, Paul, Bob, Dave (project leader) Peter, Jim and Clive.

Absent today:
Paul (he of the cool shades last week, a victim of backache from gardening, of all things )
Doug: he of the whole bag of doughnuts last week. Too much of a good thing then?

After lunch we resumed. Paul liked digging out the big quoins, and here he is with another.

Anybody want to help lift it? Anybody at all?

Eventually a gang was cajoled into carrying it away, slung to a bar.

We made a special effort today to finish off the various half built pallet fulls, so that they can go next week, full up. The first load, experience shows, was slightly under weight, so it's OK to pile them a bit higher.
Then the shrink wrap film goes round.

Most of the visible stones were removed from the southern side today, although we believe there is another row underneath.
We also made a start on demolishing the tower of rubble in the corner, which was the support for the fireplace. We haven't found it yet though, maybe next week. Too much rubble heaped on top.

Clive made a start on lifting the flagstones that made up the floor. They came away fairly easily, but were nearly all cracked.

Odd that, considering only people walked across them. But that sandstone is very soft.

On the front wall we got down to ground level when Mike reported that it felt a bit hollow. We dug further and found that we were standing on bullhead rails. Clive, member of the Permanent Way Institute, pronounced that they were of a style that was later than the construction of the line and weighbridge hut, hence were put there afterwards. They were covered by a row of blues, which is also not contemporary with the stone built weighbridge. The whole thing was covered in a layer of concrete with yellow chippings in it, a material not from this area.

Aren't we archaeologists ?

A peer between the rails found a shallow tunnel with a cast iron beam, a child's bicycle wheel and an oil can. Maybe open it out next week?

Here is the overview at the end of the day. It looks like a bomb has hit the poor old weighbridge. There's rubble all round, and several flagstones have been pulled up. As we are putting away the tools, Dave is wrapping the pallets in the background.

There are now 7 ready for transport next week, plus a whole load of boxes filled with irregular stones.

Here they are - we filled another 6 today, say three tons again. Ouch ! We are beginning to think we need a rest, which could coincide with some of us going on holiday in the second half of the month.

Three tons isn't counting the pallets with the dressed stone and quoins, please note.






History corner

Today there's a picture of Usk tunnel, 234m long and cut through red sandstone, the stuff that the weighbridge was built with. It's therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the material we are knocking down originally came from inside the tunnel.

The tunnel was located immediately next to the station, evidence of how constricted the site was, and why they had to build the goods yard on the other side of two roads and a river.

You can still walk through it, it forms part of a footpath here, which enables you to do a circular tour encompassing a part of the high street. It's very pretty.




Finally, note also that the bridges blog has been updated, with news of Broadway and plans for further bridge repair projects.
http://bridgestobroadway.blogspot.com/2018/09/work-starts-at-broadway.html