More from Broadway

Friday at Broadway.

A bit of background work is nearing fruition, as these two replica GWR poster boards had their posters applied on Thursday.

As with the first 4 posters hung at Broadway, these are printed on an aluminium laminate, following a tip off from a blog reader who saw this cleverly done on another railway.

He liked the idea so much that he paid for the first 4 posters (which are already in place). A paper poster would soon fade and be ripped to shreds in the wind.





Seizing on the very sunny weather we had on Friday, the canopy gang went to Broadway to check out the fit of the bolts in the ground for the canopy overhang posts.

These bolts are about a foot underground, and were put in prior to the start of the erection of the steps. Soon comes the time that we will use them! After fitting to their concrete base, the bolts were covered by a slab, which you can see here being removed by Neal and John with the vacuum slab lifter.

You apply a little water to the mating surface, press a button, and a little pump exhausts the air in the suction foot and this allows you to lift the slab painlessly. Better than trying to pry it out with a chisel of crowbar.

With the slab lifted off we had access to a sort of barrel lined pit which was loosely filled with spare Thermalite blocks. Neal took these out, revealing...

... a pit with the 4 bolts at the bottom. The orange pipe is the drain for the future gutter downpipe.
Now, will the base plate with the newly drilled holes fit over the 4 bolts?

If you fit 4 bolts into a concrete base at Broadway, and a year later drill 4 holes into a steel plate at Toddington, surely the chances are that there will be a slight difference between the two?

But, all credit to Neal (who admitted to worrying a little about this) the steel plate fitted perfectly. Now the base plate can be safely welded to the bottom of one of the two posts.

Next, Neal checked the height and horizontal alignment of the future post with that of the corner of the building. A piece of timber to be fitted to the steps was used for this, together with a laser level. It was suspended from the truss in the first picture, then inserted into the hole in the second.

The levels were almost perfect, which is a relief.

The horizontal alignment was checked with a line and was found to be 20mm out, but that's no big deal and we can work around this small amount.


Saturday will see our first service trains of the new season, so a test train was sent over the viaduct and into Broadway on Friday. Quite a few visitors came and asked about the first trains, which is a good sign. Please stay loyal to the GWSR, as we need your custom this year more than ever.

There were several locomotives in steam in the yard at Toddington, warming their boilers and having last minute problems identified and ironed out.

Dinmore Manor was one, and was sent to Broadway with the test train.

It looked a bit odd without its brass safety valve cover. You don't really notice them, until they are not there.

Soon after Dinmore pulled the train back out of the station, after the briefest of stays.

Ian, Neal and John watched them leave, a smart departure followed by a lovely series of exhaust beats in the distance as the train accelerated away from the 10mph station speed limit.

Having checked the bolts and post alignments we filled the hole again, slid the slab back on top and did more pleasurable things, which was to fit the two replica poster boards.

Here they are with the supporting battens attached, ready to go up.

The original 1904 station had such advertising posters on every available space on the platform side, so we put these two in the niche for the toilets, where they brighten up an otherwise darker area.

Poster job done, Neal moved on to the third job of the day, which was to pursue fitting of the timbers on the last two sections of the Cotswolds side steps.




In other business:

Yours truly has always been interested in railway clocks, and was interested in seeing the cast iron clock faces on many of the minor railway stations while on holiday in France.

The clocks there have a double face in a weighty cast iron triangular box, which was mounted on the platform side of the building. The hands were operated by a spindle that came through the wall and which was driven by a regulator (clock) that was in the stationmaster's office.

While the regulators are fairly common today (they come up on Ebay) the cast iron double clock face is not. There were two types - plain, more or less circular, and with an extra scroll underneath, described in the Paul Garnier catalogue as 'riche'.

The 'rich' one in the pictures below is now surplus to requirements in the blogger's garage, and is looking for a new home.

Restored interior, complete with spindle and gear wheels.

Outside face.

An original in situ.

But how to find this new home? As the clock casing is obviously French, it is not suitable for a UK railwayana auction. Is there a museum that would be interested? Put it on Ebay France, but how would you ship that, as cast iron is heavy and fragile?

Any suggestions or interest among blog readers?

Back on the Broadway canopy overhang

Monday at Toddington.

With all the winds and rain we've been having recently, we have temporarily transferred the site of our footbridge construction activity to the loco shed at Toddington, where it's nice and dry. Windstill in there too, but the wind does rattle terribly outside on the roller shutter doors. He wants you to know that while you have sheltered from him, he is still there.

These pieces are for the canopy overhang, the piece that unites the end of the building with the bottom of the footbridge steps. They will provide a lovely circulating area underneath, and keep passengers from the station who use the footbridge in the dry for the whole of their journey.

In the picture you can see the arched ridge purlin, the piece of sculpted fabrication that gives Broadway that special look.

The green bit is the extra length we've had to add in to try and get something like the original length back.

Neal was on the next step, which is the fabrication of the two posts which support the extra truss across the end of the steps.

The truss on the end of the building has the attachment points for the overhang structure, and the end of the canopy today is blanked off with plywood as a temporary measure.

What Neal is making here are the bases for the two columns. They will be secured to four bolts already in the ground - those just need uncovering, left and right of the steps.

A whining buzz overhead made us run out, to find this Air Force A400 scoot over the yard at slightly more than treetop height. It can't go any lower, as a few seconds' flight away is the Cotswolds edge, and the aircraft has to clear that.

Later in the day we had the ridge purlin and one of the two others out for cleaning and painting in primer.

Two fascia boards are also ready, in fact all the steelwork for the overhang, except for the two posts, is now ready.

On the woodwork, Neal has two more sections of supporting timber to cut and joint, then we attach the tongue and groove sides. It doesn't look like we are going to be able to complete the steps (Cotswolds side) before opening though. But we are close.









Wednesday with the Usketeers.

There was a big lorry behind the carriage shed this morning:

It was loaded with 5m and 10m long sheet piles. There was at least one previous lorry, as a bogie flat in the yard was all loaded up with sheet piles and ready to go south.

The contractors had a socking great big Telehandler on site too, a Manitou.

These piles must be pretty heavy; we have our own Telehandler but it's probably not up to this job.

Big, scarce money is being paid for this, and you can see where it is going.

Our money however went on doughnuts, it's a matter of priorities. Or perhaps our modest budget, and large appetite for them.

The chief doughnut runner Paul reported bare shelves in the supermarkets, what's going on? Panic buying? According to an ITV article, the average number of deaths from normal, seasonal flu in the UK per year is - 17.000 ! Who knew, and did we empty the shelves in the supermarkets in previous years? Seasonal flu has a mortality rate of 1%, Corvid19 around 2% but falling as better treatments are being developed. So why the panic? Even yours truly had flu this year, and he's still around.

Interesting factlet: two people a day die in the UK from falling down the stairs - you should be worrying about that. But probably you are not.

Your blogger's cataract procedure means avoiding dust for a month, so Neil and Dave woke Maxie out of her weekly slumber this morning.

They weren't very kind to her. Dave put his hand over her nose to start her (actually he put his hand over the air filter, a work around for a broken choke) and Neil here hit her over the head with a shovel (to dislodge some mortar clinging to the inside of the barrel).

We're a rough and ready lot.

The forecast was for rain later in the day, so we didn't hang about and tried to get as much brick laying in before lunch. We're up to row 10 on the right, and in the picture Dave is starting on the middle section to bring it up to the same height.

Here's Dave on that same middle section, working on the third course, which will bring the middle section up to row 10 as well.

Mid morning there was a toot and an impressive train with sheet piling chugged past.

It turned out to be a bit of a false alarm, as shortly afterwards it chugged by again in the other direction, so clearly a shunting move. But interesting.

Coronavirus or not, our people are ready.

While masks are not regarded as being particularly effective against the spread, at least the headgear will prevent hearing further alarming stories about it.

We had a slightly later lunch, as we guessed the promised rain ('Light Rain') would put a stop to further brick laying, so we made hay while we could. Here Dave is putting a first row on the last section, with the rows he put on the middle bit visible in the foreground.

And that's pretty much where we stopped. Anticipating the arrival of the rain while we had our snap, we covered up the work and rinsed out Maxie.

During lunch time it did indeed begin to rain, actually quite heavily. Again.

The PWay gang came back from Pry Lane, Broadway, where they had been fishplate greasing. Good progress was made, as alternate rail joints were welded here when we laid that track, so it was faster.

As we munched our lunch, we could hear the unmistakable sound of the class 73's compressor, so a quick look out of the window revealed that this was to be the actual train taking the first load of piles down to Gotherington. Soon the first passenger train of the season will rumble by.

Post - op.

Wednesday with the Usketeers

First day out after the eye operation to remove a cataract, which went well. Jolly painful though, with a chap poking your eye and asking the nurse for 'another spear' from time to time. You knew what was coming next then! As we were wheeled back into the waiting room, the next chap in line refused at the fence. The previous candidate was a little old grannie, so if she can do it, everyone can.

Now comes a period of recuperation. There are strict instructions to avoid strenuous exercise, dirt and dust. Oh.
But can I...

- Shovel ballast? No.
- Use a nut runner? No.
- Carry trip jacks and throw them into the Landie? Nope.
- Play with Maxie? Neither.
- Hack open a bag of dusty cement and throw the contents into a mixer? Certainly not !

What can we do then? Stand there and watch, gentle stuff only for 4 weeks...

The doughnuts were plentiful this morning, and they were custard ones too. You bite into them, and yellow custard squeezes out.

Someone quipped that this was like 'biting into a zit'.

That did rather affect the pleasure of eating one...





We had a very small but compact team of two for most of the day. One Usketeer was off sick, another turned up but had a back issue, while a third had a cataract operation and was under orders not to do anything strenuous or indeed dusty. What a load of wimps.

Dave here usually lays plenty of bricks, but had to spend the morning in a planning meeting for our wartime event. Most of the Usketeers wear more than one hat, and also devote time to special events, act as guard, ticket inspector, canopy construction, Hayles maintenance and so on.

So actually doing any work first thing were only Paul and John, with the same number (two) of observers, Julian and yours truly.





As Dave was not the regular mixer and was not well acquainted with the dodge of using a squirt of washing up liquid in the water, his mix came out much too soupy in this first mix of the day.

Paul, a builder with 40 years in the trade, promptly shovelled it back into Maxie for her to 'chew the cud'.

The liquid gloop was then followed by a couple of firm shovels of dry-ish sand, after which the mix had the desired stiffness for laying blues.

 

With the stiffer mortar Paul then built an intermediary column which, like the one he built on the far corner last week, went all the way to the top with course 12. This then leaves 5 courses to fill in here.

John spent the day fetching blues from the other side of the yard, so is out of sight.

Paul built a second column nearer the buffer stop, so separating the five courses still needing to be laid into three stretches to fill in.

There we go - finished. Those blues do look nice. They are all from the old turntable pit at Avonmouth, and constitute the remainder of what was taken to Broadway and not fully used there.

Here's brick fetching John just arrived with another barrow load, and surveying the scene to give himself a bit of a break.

None of us are the youngest on this job, but John we suspect is the least youngest among us, but works equally hard. It's best to keep the body moving.

Elsewhere in the yard at Winchcombe the track gang was measuring up our pile of spare flat bottom rail to see if there is a 60ft one between them.


The devil makes work for idle hands, so we wandered up to the road bridge to see the effect of those big Lego bricks that have now been dropped into the cess by the turnout we moved not so long ago.

A row of bricks at Winchcombe

Here they are, seen sideways on.

The drainage blog is very informative and will be able to say more about what is going on here.

Outside Churchward House two chaps from C&M were looking into a hole. It's what they do.

We ascertained that it was a foulwater drain with a top that had failed, so it was being rebuilt. The white bucket fitted in perfectly and was there to stop the material being chipped away from falling back into the chamber. Very neat.

A visitor returning from Churchward House reported how smart it now looked inside. A credit to those that achieved this.

Back on the wall and we had two visitors from the track gang, who had been out at Gretton to effect some repairs where a small number of sleepers had not resisted well the passage of the tamper today.

In the picture Paul was being offered a bag of his own sweets (Paul has a sweet tooth and always has a bag of sweets for the gang) and appears to have a lot to say about it. We will draw a veil over that.

After lunch Dave joined us again, after a successful meeting planning the next wartime event.

He immediately started on the infill between the first two columns Paul had built. He's up to row 9 there in the picture.

Brick laying isn't just about slapping down some bricks on to mortar, but also about pointing your work, which is what Dave is doing here. That's very slow and needs a good eye.

At one point we thought Dave had invented a new way of laying these bricks more quickly - you start with mortar, not only under the bricks, but also in between, and then you just drop them into the gap, and - finished !

Here's Paul, also infilling between two columns now. We did really well today (after last week's washout) and this end of the wall completed the day with row 10 on. Two more rows to go then.

We think we might be able to get it all done in 3 more sessions? Or maybe that's a bit optimistic, but as soon as the risk of freezing is gone we need to make a start on the building, with its lime mortar.

The end of the day was a bit more gloomy, and the temperature never climbed above 5 degrees. Sleet is announced for tomorrow.

As we walked back to wash up, the tamper trundled by, back from its two jobs at Gretton and Cheltenham. Neil was baby sitting it; we always have a member of the gang on board to act as liaison. The next job here will be to ballast the viaduct and then tamp it, ready to reopen the line to Broadway.


Spring clean at Hayles Abbey halt.

The Usketeers are a loose knit group, and also rebuilt Hayles Abbey halt. It's finished now of course, but it still needs some aftercare and tlc.

The grass is starting to grow, so a small group went out to mow the grass, as you can see on this rather sunny picture. Also taken today, well the weather does change this time of year.

The stock of leaflets was replenished with 2020 ones, and the notices refreshed.

Finally, John also took a picture of the running in board, which looks the same as before but the board itself has in fact been completely rebuilt. Instead of plywood it is now made of tongue and groove planks, which we think will be a lot more robust. Well, that is how they were made originally.
The very effective rebuild was done by the Broadway maintenance gang, and they did well.

If you have read the Cornishman just out, you will know the story behind the letters 'HALT'.