What a bright sunny day, and 23 volunteers were at Broadway to enjoy their day in the sunshine.
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Terry, Roger and Clive(I think its a shovel your
supposed to lean on!) at the end of the line. |
First on the to-do list was to continue with the block laying on Platform 2. It required 150 blocks to be laid and I had my doubts as whether the brick layers would achieve this goal by the end of the day. How wrong I was ! The hollow block laying is complete. It remains for the last half to be fill with concrete and then the 100mm topping out blocks to be laid on top. What a brilliant job!
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| Peter and Steve breaking backs |
The block filling is a major task requiring endless amounts of concrete(cheers Paul) and endless amounts of shovelling.
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| Contrary to Pic 1 Clive rarely stops! |
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| Keith trickles the ballast in |
The other task in hand was to fill the voids at the foot of the wall, front and back, to create alevel working surface. Of course this was tricky with all the other activity going on. We had the 360 mini excavator in for the day and with John Crawford loading from the south, and Jo running a pony express with the dumper, a huge amount of contaminated ballast was shifted for infill.
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| The Signal Box area gets the levelling treatment |
The impending Open Evening (24th May - don't forget!) requires that we create some level ground for the visitor areas. This is no small task either, but we're in pretty good shape now.
The best job was left till last - infilling behind the completed section of platform 2. This required filling, raking and rolling up to the "red line". As this picture shows, when it was completed Jo was able to drive the dumper the full length on the top surface, and contemplate filling the next section, when it is completed.
In other areas, lampposts were stripped and painted and yet more bricks were cleaned. Valuable work happening in the background. The small jobs allow the big jobs to happen. Include in this Bob White and Pete Dickinson driving the truck over to Sudeley Lodge Farm to pick up 350 blue bricks that we had been offered. They will, no doubt end up in the next section of wall.
And finally "the loneliness of the long distance Excavator Driver". John Crawford kept at it all day, filling dumper load after dumper load. A great job.
The best job was left till last - infilling behind the completed section of platform 2. This required filling, raking and rolling up to the "red line". As this picture shows, when it was completed Jo was able to drive the dumper the full length on the top surface, and contemplate filling the next section, when it is completed.
7 comments:
I can't quite work out where the excavator is. Is it possible to pinpoint its position please?
(eg north of the line, west of the Bridge, in the car park - but that can't be right and I don't recognise the red brick building in the background). You gather I am totally lost here Bill!!
Hi Howard,
On the trackbed, south of the Evesham Road bridge, with the Goods Shed in the background.
Don't be hard on Clive it just shows what an upright fellow he is.
Peter
I was looking at Jo Roesen's photos in the Broadway Station archive and found this site quite useful with its signal box track plan
http://www.signalbox.org/diagrams.php?id=51
Thanks, Charles. I hadn't seen this before. We are always grateful for any bits of archive our readers may find, be that documents, pictures, anecdotes or items from the station such as signs.
Best regards,
Jo
Bill,
Many thanks, Actually it is where I thought it was, really, but the photo made it look so wide! I had not realised how much room there was west of the bridge. If you go on delving ballast there you will end up in a cutting within an embankment!
To HowardGWR,
The trackbed was (is) quite wide here to accomodate the various functions of the Goods Shed and Yard. If you go to
http://broadwaystation.co.uk//broadwaystation.htm
you will see the 1957 signalling layout. Also if you go to the 1966-76 pictures at
http://broadwaystation.co.uk//scrapbook5.htm
there a couple of pictures that show this area.
On the other issue of cutting into the embankment, we are carefully scraping off the contaminated ballast, which would have to be removed anyway before putting new ballast down.
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