Draft 2 - the final countdown

While walking through Winchcombe yard today, your blogger was enthusiastically congratulated on the blog item about the Greet cutting slip.

What?

That item was prepared in draft yesterday evening, leaving a blank space at the beginning for Saturdays' PWay adventures. In draft, mind you.

At 19.15 it was published nonetheless it seems. Now 19.15 coincided with a call for 'dinner' from Mrs. Blogger round the corner - could there be a connection? The 'Save' and 'Publish ' buttons on Blogger are next to each other. No wonder we went off at half cock.

So here is part 2, all of it intended for today. 376 of you saw an early form of today's report yesterday, with all its typos. No one seemed to notice though.

Moving swiftly on then, a record number of volunteers coincided with the return of Jim and Paul in the mess coach today. Could there be a connection? It was good to see them back in action.

The weather forecast being somewhat dire, we kitted up with all the weather gear and sweaters, as you can see in the picture above. We returned to the turnout at the Toddington yard throat, damaged by the derailment of a tender with somewhat wobbly wheels. Last week we dug out the timbers involved, this week we actually replaced them.

In the picture David is cutting off the awkward GWR throughbolts, which cannot be undone by human hand. A motor powered cutting disk provided the answer.

A second team armed with a supply of Panlock clips checked out the loco roads for loose Mills clips, as several seemed to be missing or held in place with rotten oak wedges, a very old practice even when these were laid, back in the 1980s.

It was Dinmore's day today, and here she can be seen steaming into the weather past the Peak and David with the cutting disk.

We had a few showers, and then it became warmer and warmer and at the end of the day we were all stripped off again, some of us working with bare arms too. Strange weather.

Four heavy timbers needed removing from the damaged turnout.

Once out, the remaining bed needs to be cleared of loose ballast, otherwise the replacement will get stuck when you try to drag it in.

This is all quite hard work, and a rest from time to time would be welcome.

Some people didn't have to be told, and Diana here has found the new Landie an ideal place to sit back and enjoy a nice cuppa.

Cheers, chaps !

The clip replacing team worked its way up the yard, and then worked its way back down the yard.

Next to them is the Peak, whose bufferbeam has decided to go one way, while the bodywork is going another. It looks decidedly awry.

The clip replacing team, having finished the yard, then decided to work its way down the second loop, where we met our class 26 D5343 pulling away from the signal box.

This road may possibly be used as a running line in the future, but at the moment it is used as a link between the yard and the platforms.

In this area we can find our oldest track, this being the first to be laid when we came to the site in 1981 and found it bare of track.

Amongst various weeds found growing along it was this tomato plant, with its roots firmly dug into the four foot.

How its seeds got here is not for a family blog though.

Great was our pleasure when we were joined mid morning by John o' th' Knees, now back on his pins and without his trusty umbrella.

It is John who took all the early photographs of our railway, starting in 1981. They are being slowly uploaded on to the 'early GWSR' Flickr site:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/73536293@N02/albums/72157664738875108/page4

Another 40 odd pictures have recently gone up, this time including the opening train to Winchcombe on 2nd August 1988. That makes 360 of his pictures up on the site now, and there are quite a few more to come, as time allows. All the slides need scanning, then cleaning with Photoshop, so that takes time.

After removing the 4 life expired - and crushed - sleepers on the turnout, it was time to drag in the new ones, fetched up by our most useful new Landie with its longer loading deck.

These timbers are hardwood but no matter, David and Diana got stuck in straight away.

As soon as all the new timbers were off, we dragged up the old ones and heaved them on. Strangely some were still extremely heavy, despite being rotten. That's hardwood for you.

After bolting up, packing and back filling the four timbers on the turnout, our eye fell on some dubious looking examples on the turnout next door. We decided to do these as well, after lunch.

Here is one of the second lot being heaved out. It required a lot of extra digging, due to the proximity of other trackwork around it.

We had to grit our teeth a bit when this train came past. While we were slaving away below, the guilty perpetrators of the tender derailment cruised effortlessly past us in a comfortable Mk1 seat, waving to us as minor royalty. Hey.........

These two new heavy duty timbers have just gone in. Before we screw them down, we not unnaturally would like to know if everything is nice and to gauge here.

It wasn't, far too tight.

The answer was to employ two Duff jacks back to back and give one side a bit of a push. After bolting down the other side first of course.

Then it was more clearing up of failed sleepers, this time the second 4 we took out today. It takes at least 4 people to lift one up into the Landie.

We still have a bit more work to do in this area, so will be back next week.

The failed sleepers also make a nice place to sit and rest the weary bones, just as Dinmore comes by with the final train south.

Enjoy the picture!

Draft 1 - the premature publication.

In other business:

A little known but interesting piece of repair work we are undertaking is to this cutting side just south of the Greet tunnel mouth.

A slip began to develop here a few years back, resulting in this big bulge that you can see. This picture was taken in the spring of 2017.

Our cuttings often have a drainage ditch running along the top in parallel. A new ditch, dug post construction of the railway, met ours at right angles and at the point where the two ditches met the side was eroded away and the water began to run down the cutting side. This lubricated the clay and it began to slip.

Work has now started to repair the slip, and its cause. 

A temporary access road was laid across the field adjacent to the Royal Oak PH, and this can be seen in the picture above.

This access road allowed construction machinery and  material to be brought to the otherwise inaccessible site.

The slipping clay cutting side is being repaired with steps of better draining material, in a similar fashion to an embankment slip repaired at Laverton.

Each step is consolidated and waterproofed.












This is a view from the top, showing our line passing by beneath.

These photographs, kindly supplied by PWay gang member Jonathan, show how the cutting side is being rebuilt.

These scenes show how the railway is taking firm measures to protect our infrastructure, often at considerable expense.



Footbridge steps

Good progress is being made with the Broadway footbridge steps, sometimes as often as 4 days a week, with a small team of 2 or 3.

The stringers all have their cleats now of course, but nonetheless extra work is still required on them. We have the use of two jackable trolleys, which have been extremely useful as you can see. They are just right for transporting a stringer around the little area of the shed we are allowed to use.

This one needs some extra holes drilled into it, so off it goes to the drilling area.

Here are some I did earlier.....

The fourth and last intermediate landing support has just been completed.

There are an awful lot of rivet holes at the top end of it, but at last they are all done.

On Friday we trolleyed the final one over to the area where we store the finished bits, and in the picture you can see Neal securing the collection with rope so that it can't fall over.

The stringer in the top picture is having its final holes drilled here by Neal.

These holes serve to attach the uprights for the roof. The stringer of course is angled but he upright is vertical, so there is a lot of calculating and checking with a protractor to make sure the roof support goes straight up when the stringer is in.

A little overview of our work area in the Toddington loco shed. Today work was being done on the Dinmore Manor locos, and we had a very interesting conversation about the torn cylinder block of 3850 which is in the process of being replaced by a brand new casting.

3850 almost certainly had a very rough shunt at its front end during its lifetime. This led to a front buffer beam out of true and stresses in the cylinder block which eventually turned to cracks. The good news is that the experience exists in house to correct all this.

Back to the footsteps (there is a heck of a lot of cutting, drilling and welding, hence the blog thread drift...) and here is the base of one of those uprights attached to the angled stringer. These parts will come apart again for galvanising and transport, so we have marked them with a part number to make final assembly easier.

In order to avoid any undue stresses on the final rivets, we are also reaming out the rims of the rivet holes, which John here is in the process of doing.

Near the end of the day. Neal switched to the next job which was to attach gusset plates to the angles which will form the corrugated iron roof supports.

This is almost the last job on the fabrication side.

We reckon there is about another two days fabrication left to do here, then the parts are ready to be sent away for galvanising. Such is progress.

Just a little atmospheric shot of 2807 in the gloom, with as a soundtrack the storm we had banging and rattling the shed doors. That was a bit unsettling...

In the tender a volunteer is shovelling the coal up to the fall plate.

Broadway

The first two of the 4 extra triple benches were fitted with SS bolts and fully assembled earlier in the week.

They are now ready to go on the platforms, although as it happens we are coming to the end of the running season and the demand for extra sitting space is much less now. The Broadway opening passenger boost is also calming down.

The extra benches will come in useful in the 2019 season though. Two more will be built; we are currently waiting for the supplier of the 6 extra early style scripted bench ends. The woodwork is already there, cut to size and painted.

Broadway's kitchen end modesty screen has been fitted now at last.

A short section on the end was recently fabricated and fitted by the Broadway gang, in this picture not yet fully painted. The posts also need to be painted in dark stone, being supporting elements - infill elements were always in light stone.



A proposal has been sent in to change the white sockets and switches in the booking office and cafe to something more period in style.

During the diesel gala Broadway was visited by D6343, towing a 'failed' DMU.

A wash out - at last.

A real wash out today, and diesel gala weekend too. It was forecast to rain all day long, with extra low temperatures. Indeed it was only 6.5 degrees on arrival at Winchcombe this morning. That's quite a change from the 29 degrees on holiday in Italy just a few days ago - welcome back with a vengeance.

Only 4 volunteers registered on Doodle, but 8 turned up on the day. Quite encouraging, we don't get put off by a bit of rain. Well, only a little bit...

Outside was the splutter of our 1950s Type 2, D5343.

With the diesel gala on today and tomorrow, all 3 of our rakes were out in service.

The third rake was collected by D5343 from outside our mess coach, in which we sat huddled with mugs of tea.

Looking out of the door hopefully to see if it had perhaps stopped didn't help. All we saw was the class 45 trundling into the station with the second rake. Not many people on that - the first train south out of Toddy.

After much tea and debate, and not finding a nice warm indoor job for ourselves, we decided to prepare the ground for the repair of the yard throat turnout at Toddington. This received some damage 3 weeks ago during a minor derailment while shunting a tender.

D5343 pulled out of Winchcombe cautiously, and we gave it a little wave. We then helped Alan on the Telehandler clear the access to our spare timbers, so that we could select a few for the Toddington repair.

Then it was off to Toddington to inspect the turnout in question.

While the class 20 was revving up with the DMU in the background, Bert and Nigel measured the timbers that needed replacement, and noted down the numbers and types of the broken chairs involved.

We then dug out 4 timbers. This was a great idea, as we soon warmed up with the physical exercise.



Sufficiently warmed and with 4 sleepers duly dug out ready for removal next time, we spent the rest of the morning doing a trackwalk around the yard throat, and replacing clips that had fallen out, and any loose ones with Panlocks that stay in place.

As this was diesel gala day, you will get more pictures of diesel hauled trains than usual. It was nice to see that at least some diesel enthusiasts were accompanied by their partners, even if they were ensconced in their comfy seats with a newspaper and a cup of tea! That's pragmatism for you.

With all these diesels out and about, the steam lads didn't have much to do today. They too sat glumly over their cups of tea, while it rained outside. Well, that's got to be better than 15 miles tender first in the rain on 2807....

After exhausting the supply of clips we had brought, we repaired back to Winchcombe for more tea and lunch. Here the 'Green Goddess' was waiting patiently for its crossing train, while 37 215 brought up the rear.

This train was also steam heated, as you can see. Not bad for a diesel hauled train in 2018.

After lunch and most of us completely wet through, we decided to call it a day. Some took the option of a free diesel hauled train ride. Well, it doesn't come up that often.

At Toddington the class 26 was taken off, and it spluttered back into the yard. In its place came our class 47, just to ring the changes.

Signalmen usually have their box nicely sorted out - heating, tea making facilities, and a comfy chair. Just once in a while they have to lean out and exchange token with a passing train, but they don't get wet for long. And yet we could do with more of them, if that tickles your fancy for a volunteering job?




Another job in the dry, although noisy, oily and dirty, is work on the Broadway....

Footbridge steps

Neal has worked on these several times a week now, supported on and off by two more volunteers with heritage at heart.

All the steelwork has now been cut to size, and the current job is to drill the holes so that the parts can be bolted together temporarily. We asked Neal how many holes he still had to drill. He said 400 still to go. 400 holes still to drill ??? Well, he soon put that into perspective, as he pointed out that he had in fact already drilled 1600 of them. So in fact we are 4/5ths of the way there, which is really good.

In the picture above Neal is drilling the gusset plates for one of the 4 uprights for the intermediate landing supports.

Here are two that he did earlier (not with a Fairy Liquid bottle and stickyback plastic though). The supports are stored upside down, should you ask. The foundations at Broadway are already in, so all we need to do is bolt them on.

Having drilled the the big trapezoid gusset plate, the end is slid on to the stringer.

Work has also been done on the uprights for the roof supports of the steps, and the 8 main stringers with their cleats are now also done. You can see 4 of them stored here to one side.

The big pallet of gusset plates you saw in an earlier blog post were great to receive, but none had any holes. They have now though. Part of the 2000 or so holes to drill, for the 600 rivets that will be used.

More roof supports. Each still has to be fitted with a gusset plate, and the stringer to which they are attached needs holes drilled for that too.

John welded some angles up together. The table he is using has a handy hole cut into it, hence the welding light is hidden from the camera, and we can take an atmospheric picture.

Near the end of the day - we are talking about Friday here - Neal started to fit together some of the fabricated parts into larger units.
Here he has fitted a stringer with the cleats on to the top of a landing support. This is to drill the end of the stringer so that it can receive the linking gusset plate.

Having bolted the landing support to the staircase stringer, the question arose, was the angle correct? A bit late to ask now perhaps, but thanks to this big protractor we checked the angle and it was fine. Of course it was. 28.75 degrees exactly.

The stringer on the other end of the landing support also needed drilling for its gusset plate.

We could have taken the first stringer off again now, but just for fun we bolted both on together, so that you can see what one complete side will look like.

Long, isn't it? Of course this all comes apart, and fitting it on site will not be a big job.

And while we were at it, why not fit two more pieces of the puzzle? These are two roof supports, now attached to the side of the intermediate landing. Neal is really enjoying himself now.

Will it fit the back of your car? Er, no....

As we were beavering away so busily, one friendly loco dept volunteer offered to make us all a cup of tea. Now that went down well!

Our final picture of the day is to show you the arrangement at the bottom of the stringer. Originally the stringer was bolted on to a tall cast iron column that not only supported the stringer and footbridge steps roof, but also the canopy overhang from the station building. A very economical arrangement. Go and see how this was at Hall Green, where everything is still in place as built.

As the HIA footbridge reused at Broadway is about 2ft longer than the original, this arrangement cannot be replicated, sadly. The canopy overhang will therefore sit on its own 2 posts (made in the same square section style) while the end of the steps will now sit on the ground. Hence the new plate on the right. The 3 holes at the top are for a newel post in cast iron, with which the end of the steps will now be fitted. This is the most appropriate solution we could devise to give the new arrangement with the two posts at the bottom of the steps a similar look.

A final picture from Friday - D5081 has been taken out to be on show in the car park. It's in the middle of a bogie overhaul. The front one's been done; the back one is an accommodation bogie. But we wanted people to be able to see it. There are only 4 class 24s preserved - this one was the last one in normal service.