Wednesday 9 April 2014

Wednesday 9th April 2014 A Day of Challenges...

It was a day of mixed fortunes today albeit a triumph over adversity by the close of play. 22 Volunteers were on site and the expectation was to continue with the signal box build, lay some more vertical slabs behind 2B, pile the bracket post base, repair the roof of the new Cabin, clear the the driveway and build some steps to access platform 2! Oh ? and have a  Health and Safety Meeting across the lunch hour and shift the pile of Mythe bricks further down the car park. Here is how it panned out!

The sub plinth  finishing courses were laid on the signal box. Bob White and Tony Boucher worked on it all day. You can see here the end of day situation with the final bricks going on.









Further north of the signal box a team of 5 managed to lay 17 slabs behind  2B. To be honest this was an heroic effort. It seems an endless task on such along run of platform.









JC down the hole repairing the cable -
 the new capped piles in the background
The Contractors came in to pile the the Bracket post base. This was a week ahead of schedule, the contractors having had job cancelled. Unfortunately  the start was beset with niggling problems. We had been asked by S&T to shift the base  12" further away from  the rail. Sods law came into play - Pile no 1 hit an obstruction half way down and pile number 2 clipped an electric cable. The repercussions to this were  the need to shift the structure 6 ' nearer the bridge, and repair the damaged cable!. All was well that ends well, but what a bugger. The cap will be put on the piles next week.




The new cabin is setting us some refurbishment challenges - the biggest of which is to reseal the roof before the power is switched on. Here is a gurning competition between those who drew the short straw to descale the roof -  I think Jim (right) wins by a short head from Brian.








Clearing the driveway and landscaping the  land to the east of the drive has been an on going process. We needed some heavy machinery to do a quick tidying up job. However the end result was pretty impressive.







Down in the car park Steve and Jo were turning over the Mythe piles and shifting them southwards. About 1/3 of the job was completed, partly because
of calls on the JCB's time elsewhere.









Lunch but no hot water!

 Nobody said every day is easy, some times things conspire to slow you down. Because of the sheer tenacity of the volunteers, all the work for the day was completed.

 Onward and upwards!



Gord, JC and self  - we'll put the x just there......





1 comment:

Jim Boyles said...

An astonishing days work! Well done all, Gentlemen.

Jim