Blues all complete.

Thursday at Broadway.

Good weather, and lots of happy customers over on P1 at Broadway. That's what we like to see.

We did a quick trip to Toddington to pick up some bits. It also gave us the opportunity to see how Neal had been doing with the trusses.

The answer is that they have had all their rivets fitted now (background). The next stage is to fit the diagonals. The angles, cut to size, are in the foreground. Now they need to have a kink added to them, about 12 ins from the end, then they can be fitted.

The rebuild of the lost third chimney on the station building is progressing, albeit slowly.

The main body of the chimney, in reds borrowed from Broadway, is now clearly visible. Now comes the decorative bit.

 

 

In the station itself we had the 7 coach steamer about to head south, hauled by 3850. At the same time there is a DMU departure from P2 for Broadway. It is now clear to us why this run always has very few passengers - with a choice of steam or diesel both in the station at the same time, people vote with their hearts.

We also overheard a strange question, while both trains were in the station.

Passenger, standing by a Mk 1 : 'Is this train electric, and is that one over there diesel?'

Now, some might take this level of knowledge of our trains to prove that we need only pay scant attention to authenticity (Former chairman: 'People don't look up...') but our role is that of a living museum. So we must educate - show people exactly what it was like, precisely because they don't know.

Over in the old garden centre site more concrete sleepers have arrived from Bicester. We now have 7 stacks of 50 - 350 sleepers in total. That's an excellent total for a winter relay, plus the rail that goes with them, which came earlier.

Back at Broadway John completed laying the last of the blue plinth headers. That's it for the base of the building.

Now we can continue with the reds for the main body of it.

Here's the corner from last week. Taken down again, and rebuilt in English bond.

English bond means courses of headers, which in our case means half bricks.

We started the slow and dusty process of cutting the reds in half, to give John something to work with.

Neal came to build the second temporary door frame. This will allow us to keep laying reds, while we sort out the manufacture by a joiner of the door frames, doors and windows to GWR designs. Luckily we have plenty of evidence from our only original station, still standing after 120 years, at Toddington.

Neal helped with stacking supplies of complete bricks. As these have stood waiting outdoors since the P1 build was finished in 2017, they are either a bit dirty, or green with mould, or both, so need cleaning individually before stacking.

During the day, which was quite busy at Broadway (21 passengers on the DMU after lunch, which is unusually high) we also had 3850 come by.

The number on the buffer beam appears to have been a sticker, as the '8' is peeling off.

Where is Alex, when you need him?

By the end of the day John had made himself several towers, from which to work next time. Laying the reds is more interesting, as you now have to calculate in the specials, which here form rounded corners. Note the brick centre right, which transforms a bullnosed red corner into a right angled plinth underneath. Very elegant.

Our passengers mostly didn't know this, but they love it when they see it. That is what being a living museum is all about.

Talking about living museum, we'd like some indoor GWR benches, upholstered like this one.

These could go inside the new waiting room, down the side, and help make it a function room. The trouble is, we have never been offered one yet. We've had a couple of donated all wooden ones, which would go outside, under the canopy. (one is just visible on the right). But never an indoor one with a padded seat. They are made of pitch pine and Rexine.

One is currently on Ebay at £1200, which is beyond our means, and the joiner we visited on Friday for our doors & windows quoted £1800 +VAT  to make one. That's even further out of reach.

Can anyone help?

Saturday, out with the gang

A big gang of 12, it must be the fine weather that brings us out.

Driving Miss Daisy...

We packed them into the Ranger, three more in the tipper truck, and the rest had to go by private car - to Cheltenham Race Course signal box, where 4 wooden sleepers were life expired.

No warning boards needed here, we were right under the signalman, who watched the goings on with interest. There isn't much to do between trains.

The first thing was, of course, digging out the old ones. They were made of wood, as shorter ones are required when opposite a track centre drain, such as here.

These tracks here were laid at the end of 1999, faster and faster after Southam lane, as the head of the Friends of CRC had offered the gang a bottle of champagne if they connected his station before the year end. 

They made it, just.

We had to stop digging when the train arrived, so that was the opportunity for a coffee and some of the doughnuts left over after the briefing.

We had brought 4 replacement sleepers with us (second hand, they last longer than new) but they needed plugging as our base plates did not match their holes.

Simon is cutting off the plugs that are still sticking out here.

After three of the sleepers had been pulled into their spaces, David drilled new holes for their base plates.

You can see him here, accompanied by a little cloud of two stroke smoke.

Another sleeper to be done was on the platform road, opposite.

This one was very heavy, as it was a re-purposed crossing timber, and its weight was further added to by the water it had soaked up overnight from the heavy rain.

We got all 4 old sleepers up on the deck of the tipper. This is a slightly smaller vehicle than the new blue van with the tail lift, but it actually has a much higher carrying capacity - 1100kg, as against a net of 645Kg for the blue Transit, with its heavy tail lift (that comes off its own carrying capacity)

As we were screwing down the fourth sleeper, the rest of the gang started a second job on the other side of the crossing, where a number of dipped jhoints had been diagnosed. These were lifted an packed.

Then off back to Winchcombe, for a 4 o'clock tea.

Monday at Broadway.

Two of us on site, a brickie and his mate...

Neal went to Toddington, to drill holes. More major surgery on the 4 trusses has had to be suspended as 3850 ran a hot box and needed to make use of the lifting jacks - just where the trusses were located. Such is life, in railway preservation we all have to collaborate, so Neal spent some time moving all the steels to somewhere else in the shed.

 

During the morning John laid this row of half reds along the front.

Spot the deliberate mistake - the Broadway maintenance gang certainly did from the other side of the tracks, but that first brick on the second course should have been a corner, part of a column alongside the door.

It was soon sorted, as the mortar was still damp - see below.

 

John is also building various towers, and this is one on the corner of the store room.

This corner will have bullnoses on it, a lovely architectural feature.

After lunch John put down the second course, and at the same time rectified the errant brick by the door, replacing it with the base of a column. These architectural bricks are handed, so you have to be careful with which one you take.

Mid afternoon it was time to point the work. Slowly the store room on the end is rising up from the plinth.

Yours truly cut a whole lot of stretchers in half, to make them headers. This will be a regular job, as every other course is made of headers, so loads and loads need to be cut.

Cleaning bricks is also producing results - look at all these blues and reds, rescued from the demolition site and cleaned up. They could be used in the proposed Toddington platform extensions for example.

Tuesday at Broadway.

We're making good use of the dry weather this week. There will be three days on site, and this was the second.

 

The day didn't start well. The (electric) mixer turned 5 or 6 times, then stopped. Now the mixer often refuses to start, due to an electrical issue (- if we have this right -) where we press the start button at the wrong part of the electric AC cycle and the fuse goes. That means having to get the office keys out, and resetting the trip. All very time consuming, with a lot of legwork up and down the platform.

But this time there was current, but it stopped. Now what?

Call doctor Neal !

Fortunately Dr. Neal was on call, and duly arrived just as an ambulance went by, with its siren on. It seemed to announce his presence...

A loose wire in the plug was diagnosed, and we soon had the mixer humming again. Not before making John a manual mix (to get him started) which was quite hard work, stirring round that barrow with a shovel.

Tuesday was a blue timetable, so we had the visit of the class 117 DMU.

This is its last week in service with us, so grab a trip now, if you want one. It's leaving some time next month, but the last run will be during next weekend's gala. The exhaust note, as the revs mount, is quite striking, a sort of loud chattering. Is that normal?

The booking office is getting increasingly crowded with sundry small notices peppered about, which detract from the 'living museum' atmosphere that we try to create. Three notices about dogs, three about cash and cards, taxi ads, plastic snap frames, and one about no aardvaarks allowed on the train. 

A replica GWR poster of Cheltenham has a modern advertisement pinned over the top of it. There is, sadly, no control.

On the big poster board is an explanatory A4, which at least gives a brief resume of what we are up to on the other side.

In fact the most popular items at our 1904 station are the replica posters. We often see people taking photographs of them. They ask if the posters are available for sale, and the answer to that is no. You can buy them on line, as we did.

 

We've had some housekeeping tasks on our project. One was to visit a joinery, to get a quote for the doors and windows. Sadly our preferred joiner decided to retire.

We also need a number of special bricks, as we don't have all of the ones we need. We are also a cill short, and one is a bit chipped. It's been hanging around for almost 10 years after all.

They've absorbed some dirt too, and Neal here is trying to clean them (without success).

On the reds John is doing quite well, with this corner up to the fifth course already. But other corners have zero courses, so there's plenty still to do.

During Tuesday John laid the third course left of the door, and that is the course for the window cills - hence Neal's interest in cleaning them.

Additionally a first course was laid up to the middle of the front.

Blast from the past.

Picture by Paul Fuller.

23 years ago, and the GWSR reached the southern end of the line in Hunting Butts tunnel*.

This was the opportunity for a PWay gang photograph:

On the loco:

Keith Kendall, Mike Townsend, John Lees.

On the ground:

Charles Martin, Nigel Black, Ian Purkess, Pete Regan, Unknown, Clive Hawkins, Dave French, Stevie Warren.

 

Where are they now... (one is still in the gang today!)

* The trackbed in our ownership goes on another 3/4 mile, to just short of the Prince of Wales Stadium, but this is currently unused (and seems likely to remain so, due to various issues)