The last knot

Monday at Broadway.

Another rainy day, but luckily we're under the centre span canopy, so dry - in principle.





The Malvern end roof is now done, so before we move the scaffolding along we're going to correct the colour of the angled supports.

You can see that they are dark stone below, but change colour near the top. That isn't logical.

While John spent the day applying the second undercoat to the Cotswold end, we laboriously painted in undercoat all the nooks and crannies on the angles at the Cotswolds end.

The green bits are rusty areas that we treated earlier.

On Wednesday we sorted out transport of the first shipment of sawn timbers from the joinery shop at Winchcombe, where they had drip grooves added, and one side angled. You can see this on the end profile in the picture.

We're going to get the first 20 on Friday. More are being made. These items go along the bottom of the stringers.




Usketeers on Wednesday.

A mild day, and a nice team come to finish the steelwork for the foundation slab of the Usk hut, while more went to busy themselves with track maintenance.

The first thing to do was have tea, one of Paul's hot sausage rolls (there is currently a dearth of doughnuts!) and study the magazines left by someone.

Some are quite recent, you could save real money here by reading them thoroughly...

The Usk team galloped off early, and threw themselves into tieing those innumerable knots between the rebars, here on the stools that support the second layer.



With all the stools in and tied up, we started to lay in the top layer of 80 rebars.

To start with two of us could work outside the pit, but soon we were all standing in it and bending down the whole time to tie those many knots.

Jim kept us supplied with lengths of wire, which he cut off from a big coil.

Neil moved all the rebars nearer the pit, thus clearing the alternative way into the site again.

From the nearer pile, we gradually laid them all in as the top layer.

We spent 20 minutes with C&W to prepare moving the 20 prepared timbers to Broadway, and to recover the grate, which the C&W welders were very kind to repair for us. Three of the fire bars were burned through, but we noticed that GWR fence spears had the same square profile, so an offcut from Broadway was obtained, cut into three pieces and expertly welded in. Like new it is now.

Here's some of that back breaking work of tieing knots - we laid out four spots and kneeled on top of them, but somehow all the muscles still hurt.

From time to time we would get up, stretch, and have a walk round the site, then resume.

Somebody said, how about a coffee break in the station? Well, you don't have to say that twice. We were very relieved to be able to stop at someone else's suggestion.

Coming back from the Coffeepot - guilt forced us away after 10 minutes - we met the sole steamer out today, 35006 P&O.

Even though we are used to seeing big locos all the time, we do pause to look at this big Southern pacific.

The name plate is nice to see too, and note how the name of this loco is so long that they had to abbreviate it with letters for the last three words. Is it the longest name in preservation? Or ever?

Coming back from the Coffeepot, we could see from the position of the spots that we had done about a quarter of the top row by that time (late morning).

We then carried on the remaining rebars, so that we could pull them into their final places as we advanced on our hands and knees.

The rest of the day was spent doing this, 4 of us in a row tieing knots.

Very slowly we advanced across the 5m x 5m pit.

At the end of the day we had achieved this: the top layer of rebar is in!

Paul felt it was a bit early to call for concrete as early as next week, there are a few more small bits to go in, and a few more knots to tie, but the worst is over, what a relief.

At the end of the afternoon we were glad to go to the Coffeepot (for the second time today, but it is so close and so tempting).

'Hey, I thought you were a member of the PWay gang, what's this?'  'Ermmmmm.....'

Under the station canopy we ran into Mike, absent for the last few turns. He seemed to have traded orange for black, but promised to come back once his training was complete (we often wear more than one hat in our volunteering contribution).

Then that delightful last cup of tea of the day, under the canopy as the mighty pacific rolls in.

Halcyon days....