A quickie

Yes, yes, we're supposed to be on holiday, but it's not until Sunday and in the meantime there have been 2 more days of events.

A trip to Tyseley

On Thursday a select few from the drainage gang, C&M and yours truly took two Transits to Tyseley Locomotive Works to recover a number of useful bricks.

At Tyseley the bricks were stacked in a rather inaccessible area near the yard throat, far from any road. To get them out we had permission to use a Permaquip trolley, which we took with us from Winchcombe, where you can see it being loaded here.

Once at Tyseley we assembled our little rail vehicle and started pushing, meeting another, larger, rail vehicle on the way.

We had 4 wheels, and that big green thing had two more, i.e. six.  Show off!

Arrived at the end of the yard, we found our stack of desirables.

It's a big pile of diamond patterned edging bricks. We were interested in about half of them, the other half being of a different, bigger type that was in rather less attractive condition.

Also of interest to us was a pile of engineering blues, bull noses and some double ended bull noses (they probably have a special name for them too) and this is why we had the drainage gang with us, who have a particular use for them.

Many hands make light work!

We learned that a lot of the special bricks arose from the demolition of the Tyseley roundhouse.

The whole site had interesting corners, such as this one: spearhead fencing, a spearhead gate and a ball topped posts such as in use at Broadway.

This little bijou set was right behind a buffer stop, so not serving much purpose, we felt.

We ran several trolley loads down the line, blocked for us and with all the points set the right way.
Much banging came out of one of the boilers in the background, but hey, this is a locomotive works.

Here is a trolley load just arriving at its destination, where you can see the corner of a Transit with a partial load on it already.

Both Transits were filled with about a ton of material.

In the foreground the diamond pattern edging blocks are being loaded. These will come in useful for both the goods platform at Winchcombe, and the future turntable pit. We need quite a few of these, and the 128 collected today play a (smallish) part in this.

Here is all the material safely unloaded and stacked on 3 pallets at Winchcombe.




Friday at Broadway.


Given the fine weather, we had another painting day. We'll leave the manufacturing to days of less clement weather, which will arrive no doubt quite soon.

Neal and john have been quite busy on the P2 steelwork, which was well advanced at the end of the day. Just a bit of topcoat to go on the tower legs.

You can see in the LH picture that they are dark stone now. In the RH picture the team assembling the bridge a few years back now were a bit too quick, and painted the legs, a structural thing, in light stone, except for the top surrounding the panel. This anomaly is now being addressed. It also gives the towers another 3 coats of paint, covering up the many nicks and scratches they have had as the station building was going on around them.

The GWR painted structural things (legs, frames etc) in dark stone, and the bits in between (panels, infill etc) in light stone.

This lovely light shows today's footbridge to great advantage..

Note in particular that the fencing in front is now complete. What a great piece of design, to get this far from a bare, weed covered demolition site.

Still do do then:

- The sides of the steps, in T&G wood with cross bracing timbers
- The treads, risers, and hand rails
- 'Passengers are requested to cross the line' etc on the two rail posts by the entrance
- The canopy extension, which will reach to just past the end of the P1 roof over the stairs. This will be a job for next year.



A bit more Broadway history

Following the publication of John Lees' pictures of the 2007 clearance at Broadway, Roger Bush was kind enough to send us three more. Roger was part of the gang, and has fond memories.

This gateway gave access to the track for a long time. We're looking diagonally south here, with the fire seen in John's pictures burning near the road bridge on the left.

The gate is approximately where the southern entrance gate to the platform is today, but the platform level today is round about where the white hard hat is!

Looking north.

Looking south, with the far parapet of the road bridge visible on the left.

Those catch pits remained opened for quite a long time, until Jim H made them a set of plywood lids. It didn't stop various delivery lorries from putting a wheel down them though.

P2 on the right was extended almost up to the bridge, so a lot of material was dumpered up to it in due course.