Saturday 1st November 2014 - better late than never....

A day of two halves! 12 volunteers were on site in the morning and then everyone donned their best bib and tucker to go to the GWSR Volunteers Meeting at Toddington Village Hall.

Perhaps the most interesting activity of the morning from an engineering point  of  view was the drilling out of the old rivet stems from the brackets that retained the hoops on the footbridge. Steve B having ground the heads off on Wednesday was able to bore out the stems. An excellent bit of kit, borrowed from S&T, did the job in, what seemed, no time at all.

And there they were gone - or at least removed from their positions and resting in the bridge.

At the northern end of the site, work continue on erecting the northern boundary fence. Its coming along nicely and should be finished by the end of next week.

Clive cut a lonely figure on Platform 2C - laying a good course of headers. he should be happy enough knowing that the Blues were at least going to manage a draw!

Roger H and Robin continued on the brick cleaning - some blues were recovered by George Law on Wednesday and they kindly dropped them off for us. They instantly got cleaned and piled ready for use.

Here Chis Bristow  runs through the figures and asks John
Balderstone to take  a well earned bow for his
 management of the bridge  repair project...

In the afternoon it was the the GWSR Volunteers Meeting at Toddington Village Hall. Not a venue I have been to before - but its a very pleasant venue with lots of space. The theme of the presentation by the Directors was an assessment of the year to date  and what the Railway should be looking to achieve next year. Some time was spent analysing the passenger numbers across the various special event during the year. The special events really make the difference between an operating profit and a loss. It is often difficult for the event organisers to find sufficient staff to run these events. It's important that all departments rise to the challenge of helping to man these events, not least the Broadway Area Group.

The Broadway Area Group  had been offered some bits and pieces of  GWR Railwayana.

A couple of words of explanation from Jo:

 3 firing tools left to us by Ray Powell, a former fireman at Gloucester and one of the founder members of the GWSR many years ago.

I took them down to Toddington (with some difficulty, as they are jolly long) and the people there were so grateful, I decided to go back and get another, damaged one, in which they also expressed interest. We were also given three metal trunks (for putting on a platform trolley) some GWR glassware and a tickets sign for the Broadway booking office, which I will  have copied. We still need the IN and OUT signs.