The end of the wall.

Friday at Broadway

The canopy gang was at full strength again today - three. To be fair, we had a painter-helper from the Broadway gang, and painting is pretty much what we did. It's amazing how much paint this project swallows up.

The first batch of painted T&G boards - for making the sides of the steps - was taken 'upstairs' today and stored in the centre span.

Another 20 boards were taken out of storage, and taken down to the painting area where a first coat of primer was applied to 5 of them.

In the picture you can see a short piece of the original boarding from HIA on the left.

While we were up there we took this picture down the P1 steps. The roof is on, and a start has been made with undercoating the stringers. Before you do that, everything has to be put in etch primer, and then primered in grey as well. You need a lot of patience.





These same stringers got a coat of the etch primer today, thanks to John. Here he is doing the upper half.












On the P2 side Mike did the same, but he was a tad further than John. The etch primer was applied earlier in the day, and here the grey primer is being applied.

Neal is 'watching paint dry'.

Later Neal started putting the centre section guttering back into place. The ends of this had to be removed to allow the placing of the steel stringers a few weeks back now. This guttering had to be cut to size again, as it was originally placed without an exact idea of where the steps would go, so they had to guess.

The location of the scaffolding pole didn't help either.

We had a very pleasant lunch outside the mess hut. We sat outside; the drawback to this is that there is nowhere to put your lunch. Or is there? Neal had the answer!

On the subject of lunch, there was a bit of brainstorming going on about the P2 building. How long should it be? There is general agreement that it should be an extra bay longer than originally, to balance the extra length of the main building. But if it had two extra bays, where would that take you? Neal and Tony paced out the options.

From a heritage point of view the reinstatement of a shorter horse dock could be attractive, perhaps with some sort of mess coach / workshop or museum on it. The platform could then be routed around it. The two steel containers currently at that location are not pretty.

This picture by John Diston shows the area. As today's platforms are longer than before, they currently end in the vicinity of the hut in this late 1950s picture.

Food for thought.

While all the footbridge stuff was going on, the FoBS gang was making a sliding gate for the B&B. The steelwork is already in the ground; all that is needed is the gate itself and here it is, almost completed.




Wednesday on the goods platform.

Half of us were on the goods platform, the other half was off delivering some new sleepers and timbers to Toddington.

We had a shopping list for the timbers (sleepers are standard) and so there was some climbing about the pile with a tape measure.

The selected candidate was then manhandled on to the forks of the Telehandler for loading on to the Landie.

Loading 4 timbers on to the back of the Landie was heavy work, so a bit of a conflab ensued, before the party drove off to Toddington, leaving the 'wall bangers' to carry on laying blocks.

This is the opening situation. Last week (no blog due to a trip to Wales) the gang laid the remaining blocks on the top, 11th row, with the exception of half a dozen or so, for which the mortar ran out.

Maxie has such small mouthfuls, see.

Peter finished off these last 6 blocks, and also helped to dig out the floor level of hard left over lumps of mortar, so that we could lay the bottom layer for the facing bricks.

The main action today was here - on the other side of the stop block. We have a short foundation in there, and today Dave and Paul started building the block core here for what will be the return around the stop block. We needed to cut this sleeper down a bit and thought we had a chain saw, but we didn't. Never mind, we had Dave, a bow saw and a lot of patience.

Have you finished yet, Dave?

Paul is putting mortar on the bottom row for the next layer, while Dave behind is still adding to the bottom row.








Today we also had a glimpse of the sort of edging bricks that we plan to use on top of the wall. The have a flat rear, a rounded front, and a diamond pattern tread on top. They're not easy to find these, but we have indicative agreement to fetch a supply of them from a disused station. There should be enough to go round the turntable too.
When the agreement is definite we will be able to say from where. We did a site visit on Tuesday, and it all looks very do-able. There is a large supply of good quality imperial Brindles as well.

Maxie was in fine spirits today. It's not clear what they gave her to drink last Wednesday, but today she jumped straight out of bed on the first pull. Whatever has gotten into her?

We had two piles of sand from the beginning, and a little milestone was reached today in that we started the second pile, or lorry load. In the picture you can see the second pile - this is how much sand has gone through Maxie and via wheelbarrow to the block layers. And she's still going strong. Mind you, it wore out Minnie....

More blocks were called for, and arrived by Telehandler. We have one more pile in reserve, but that should be enough now.

When the wall is finished, we'll move over on to the building.

Today there was a two train service, crossing at Winchcombe. Tokens have just been exchanged with 4270, while Steve, firing on 35006, waits for the token that 4270 has just handed in.

In a spare moment we had a quick look in the carpentry workshop of C&W, where Eddy and Neal were making the mouldings for the footbridge steps.

These are due to go down the sides, under the 6 inch overhang of the corrugated iron sheets.

These here are half finished.

Neal has the head of the spindle moulder here and is changing the cutting edges from convex to concave.

Here he is showing us how the convex blade on the right has done its job cutting a channel, and next is the concave blade on the left, which will round off the middle.

Then it was back to Maxie, who disgorged for us another barrow load for the block layers. Will she never tire?

This is where the mortar was going. Yes, to that man, to Dave! Can there be any doubt? It's him!

This is what Dave's work looked like at the end of the afternoon. We have one short block wall, with cutouts for the facing engineering blues, which will be laid up against them, so hiding the modern blocks with a bit of antiquity.

We now have two towers left and right. The plan is to lay a lintel across them, then back fill the hole with the concrete sleepers in it.

Just because Dave finished the short wall, there is no need to sit down and doze.

Neil has just been uncomfortably woken by a firm prod from Paul.

Oi, snap out of it, we have more block laying to do, it isn't over yet.

And indeed there is a new row of blocks being laid now. They're at the foot of the wall, and their job is to support the facing bricks that will go on top and in front of the wall.

At the end of the afternoon we got half way along, so that little job should be signed off too by next week. Then we might think about back filling, allow the fill material to settle down for as long as possible.

We also had 10 bags of cement to put in our corrugated iron hut. They weigh 25Kg each, and are awkward to lift (they seem to struggle, or behave like the proverbial sack of potatoes) so we had the idea of offering them up to the sap inside the hut using the Telehandler. He thought he was getting help to lift them, but found himself alone in the hut, looking at 10 sacks of cement...

The picture on the right has a question attached to it. It's one of 2807's boot scrapers, and a customer wanted to know what the No.7 was on one end. We noticed that this number could be one of many (No. 19 is next door) but all were chairs cast by GKN for BR (W).

Does anyone know what the number signifies? A casting batch number perhaps?

Finally it was tea time, and time to meet the others gang members outside the Coffeepot. This always happens just as the steam hauled train heading north meets the last down train of the day, heading south.

And here is the down train, the last one always hauled by a diesel and today it was D5343. We like its slow, relaxed chug.