General winter is coming.

Saturday at Peasebrook (again)

Back to 11 gang members, after only 6 last week. Much better! It does halve the workload so well.

 

We were back at MP6 I, close to where we were last week, and the week before that. For some reason the track is moving here, and we keep having to come back and 'whack a mole'. It's not always exactly the same bit, mind. But it feels like it.

Here we are, exposing the sleeper ends, so that we can put the sluing jacks in on the right, and push the track up, and over a bit.

We got everything ready, holes dug, sleepers exposed, jacks in but not lifted, and then we had to wait for the train to go up to Broadway, and back down again. Today we saw 7903 Foremarke Hall, under an azure sky and a low sun. Beautiful.

 

Jim brings up a shovel of ballast to feed the hungry monsters.

We jacked, shovelled and Robelled. With a big team like ours on Saturday, we could have done with 2 more Robels, these wonderful machines.

What was different today was that Dave brought up the Telehandler with the big bucket. This had two advantages: 

- A handy seat for tired gangers, and

- To bring in larger supplies of surplus ballast from some way up the track, where there was too much. Then all we had to do was shovel it out of the bucket and in between the sleepers, just a few feet away.

We'll fast forward a couple of hours of robelling and shovelling, to show you Foremarke Hall again, up for its second trip to Broadway. Still a lovely sky there.

Here's how the Telehandler really helped us today. Just scoop up some ballast, turn round, drop it in. Done!

You know how you can put something important, something you really need while driving your car, under the windscreen behind the steering wheel?  This is how the leftover doughnuts came up to Peasebrook.

 

Then we had the ear defenders for one eared people. They are for sale - any one eared people out there?

 It was the one eared ear defender that caused us to bring out this jar of sweeties:

Well, it certainly looks like one. Help yourself! You hold it at a 45 degree angle, turn the red knob, and eventually one turns up at the bottom. Neat.

Back from his trip to Broadway, Ben the driver was concentrating really hard on our worksite, and then gave the Hall the beans when pulling away over Little Buckland bridge. Lovely to hear.

Wonder if there are two more Robels at the end of the rainbow?

That rainbow was amazing, it went right down to the other side, too wide for the camera lens. We could see a nasty cloud over Breedon Hill, and round here, that means you are going to get a soaking. But the beautiful rainbow was the reward afterwards.

The rainbow was caused by this fierce, low sun shining into a wall of rain over Broadway, just as P&O came by with its train. We were just packing up, having done several panels of lifting and straightening, just like last week.

The back end of P&O's train was the class 20, whistling away. The rainbow was still there, just, but too faint for this picture. You can still see a little stub end of it on the left.

Wednesday with some Usketeers.

Just 3 of us, and Paul had to leave early too. So limited progress today, with only a half day worked.

We put back the two trusses that we removed earlier, as we have now finished working inside, and will put up the last few inches of gable end from the outside.

In the picture John is cutting a short piece of 4x2 that was needed as a spacer.

 

 

We spent most of the day getting ready for winter. We will need to spend quite a bit of money on expensive scaffolding. We don't have the money to rent this, so other solutions are needed. We took down the trestles anyway, as we can go no higher with them now.

That means that the little Usk hut is now 'exposed' as it were, being unencumbered, and visible from all angles.

We took some snapshots for you:

The gable end by the tree.

The other gable end, now without trestles.

At each end we just have a little triangle to fill in now, and of course the chimney to put up. If we get scaffolding, then we will put up two lifts here, to be able to work round the rising chimney. This will be made of engineering blues, with a little drip shelf at the top. It will also enclose that liner pipe, which was flopping in the wind today - it was surprisingly windy, blowing over Mrs. Blogger's dustbin and breaking one of the hinges. Didn't know the wind could do that... what will the dustbin men say?

Today we had the blue timetable. That means one steam and one DMU, both visible in this picture. Some trains were quite well filled, others less so. During a phone call we took today we heard that passengers numbers are well down elsewhere.

During the afternoon we helped the Friends of Winchcombe clean up one of the lamp posts recovered earlier this year. This is the one from Evesham:

It had many thick coats of paint, in a variety of cream, chocolate and white. Note the No.2 on the base, marking this one as a 6ft high platform post (remember the 4 on the much taller yard lamp post?).

The '2' looks to be proud of the casting, but it's an optical illusion - it's actually engraved into the metal. Weird, isn't it!

Here is Ian of the FoWS, picking out the detail of this GWR post, with its typical acanthus flower pattern.

We're always open to donations of other GWR lamp posts, as we need several more. We will give them a worthy home in a GWR station. Contact: breva2011 (at) hotmail.co.uk, or through the contact page on this blog.

At the end of the day we took this picture of our little Usk weighbridge hut. Doesn't it add to the atmosphere! Just the slates and the chimney to go. More or less, anyway.

Today we readied for winter, by covering the tops of the wall in hessian, which we nailed down with battens. We have borrowed a decent tarpaulin, and will put that over the top, so that the interior is dry and the trusses protected from the rain.

 

See you next week!