A new blog !

 

Friday June 5th at Toddington.

 

A small Friday gang was at work by the greenhouse on Friday, dealing with the spent sleepers from the siding 2 relay that has been going on. We need to recover the ironwork, and sort the sleepers into siding quality, garden quality, and compost.

 

On our way to Toddington we checked out a report of a cracked sleeper. 

The crack was on top, but did not seem to go all the way through. Possibly a very old one.

David dug away some of the ballast to see more of it.

Also saw a hare bouncing along in front of us on the haul road. 

 

 

 

In the yard an 80 tonne crane had come to lift off Foremarke Hall's boiler. The job went without problems.

 

 

 

A little later the steam dept was already removing the ash pan.

It struck us how strange it was that the rear driving axle goes straight through this box filled with hot cinders. A similar one has given trouble with Betton Grange. A steam dept. member also observed that the coal we are now forced to use burns very hot, leading to distorsions in the metal at the bottom.

 

But back to the job in hand, the stripping and sorting of the sleepers from the siding 2 job.

 

 

 

 

There was another, smaller job to do beforehand - providing the gang on Saturday with another 12 economy sleepers to complete the relay job. They were put by the Parlour Road, ready to be picked up by STEVIE and his trailer.

 

 

 

 

 

The worn out sleepers were piled up here (the pile had already been reduced a little at this point). David is using the impact wrench to extract the chair screws, or, as in almost half the cases, the throughbolts. These are typically rusted solid and just revolve if you try to undo the nut. That leads to a lot of extra work.

 

We used a bar to try and hold the revolving plate underneath, and this sometimes worked. If not, the only alternative was to cut the top nut with an angle grinder, as Paul is doing here. 

 

We did this all day long, and eventually were successful in stripping all the sleepers into their respective components.

In the background is the place where the extracted sleepers were piled up, and in the foreground are all the throughbolt chairs that we managed to get off - lots of them, as you can see. They are for 2807 and their boot scrapers.

 

 

 

We used the little Telehandler to sort the sleepers into piles. These and all the other materials from the relay we will need to take back to Winchcombe. That's for another day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the day we also took a snapshot of the grinding stone that the RATs have restored. They would like to see this positioned next to the lineside hut that we are building. It would certainly be a suitable location, as the PWay workers also cut the grass along the line with their scythes, which would need regular sharpening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A surprise action at Toddington on Friday was the arrival of the  Great Eastern shunter 229.

Further enquiry revealed news of a private special to Broadway. How exciting  ! 

The GWR inspection saloon was to be involved. 

 

 

The little blue engine bustled past; then we had to return to Winchcombe to put back the tools. Not before helping a stressed out courrier who a). Didn't have the access code for the now closed main gate and b). Had a parcel with a very vague customer address, a loco group in Toddington yard. They were absent that day of course, leaving the poor man trying his luck down the side of the diesel shed. 

After locking away the tools at Winchcombe we were delighted to find 229 now at the head of its little private excursion train. 

GER 229 with the GWR inspection saloon annd two Mk1s.

Our last glimpse of the little blue engine was it pulling out of the C&W sidings, ready to return to Toddington.

 

 

 

 

Monday under the greenhouse.

The pressure is now on to get ready for the big lift in August.

All three of us were at Toddington, painting. There is so much to paint, but the weather isn't helping, it was raining heavily all morning.

 

 

The southern side was more affected, so we painted in the middle and on the northern edge. Suddenly we found ourselves getting wet nonetheless - the wind direction had changed. The wood we were painting became wet as well.

We decided to sit down under the station canopy and have a cup of coffee (from the Thermos, the cafe being closed on Mondays)

 

 

There were two rakes in, and some brave people were cleaning them, inside and out. We do hope you appreciate their efforts, even if you don't notice them, until a carriage looks dirty again.

We smiled at the idea of hosing down a carriage in the pouring rain.... 

 

 

Further along the platform a team of two volunteers were also in the rain, preparing the slope of the platform for reconstruction. There was a digger and a supervisor...

 

 

It's not an easy site to work on, the descending slopes ends at a mish-mash of pipes, conduits and a lineside cupboard. After the rebuild it will all loook neater. The platform wiill be lengthened by replacing the slope with a straight bit of 5 1/2m, and a set of steps. That will actually allow a full extra carriage to stop opposite a platform, providing that the loco isn't taking water at the other end.

 

 

It was still raining when we walked back along platform 1... the umbrella had been abandoned where it was, as it was too wet to be taken inside. Very wise.

Late morning we were joined by John and Neal, who had been on a canopy glazing buying mission. Sadly without succcess, our original P1 supplier having gone out of business. It's special glass, made by Pilkingtons, and has a greenish tinge, which is very Victorian. Hope they find a supplier.

 

The weather finally improved, and all afternoon we painted furiously. Here Neal is separating the purlins from each other, so that we can get at all sides and give them an undercoat of dark stone.

 

 

New Blog.

After posting a report on the 16th May meeting of Exmoor Associates and the Barnstaple & Yeo Valley Railway Trust, it has been suggested that this could be the start of an entirely separate blog for the B&YVRT. They seemed to like what we wrote...

 

So here goes:

https://yeovalleylines.blogspot.com/2026/06/welcome-welcome-to-yeo-valley-lines-new.html 

It kicks off with that same report, then goes on with a first report from one of the volunteers on the ground. They can now show what they are doing, which is great.

Along the side you can also see 4 diagrams of all the different sections of the route below Wistlandpound, so you can easily see what progress the land purchases are making. There are several more in the pipeline, but not enough funds for all of them, so if this is your thing, some help would be very much appreciated.

The blog should appear whenever one of the volunteers sends over something interesting. We think that should be about once a month, so take a look from time to time. It's a fascinating project, one that can never be achieved, and it says that in a book! We'll see about that....