An offer you can't refuse

The railway received a very generous offer from a junior school in Tewkesbury for some free concrete slabs, providing we picked them up immediately. An offer we couldn't refuse! You never know when you might need slabs or bricks - certainly Broadway P2 when it is completed will need lots of 3 x 2 slabs under the canopy.

Just in time the blue Transit came back from having new brake linings fitted, and three volunteers jumped aboard and whizzed off to Tewkesbury. In the picture we see Pete, Phil and Jim M just leaving, while Jim H followed in his car.

Useless fact: how do you know you are sitting in the C&M Transit? The bottle holder is full of 6 inch nails....

At the school the Transit team was met by Mike and Bob Mac, himself a Tewkesbury resident. Could there be a connection?

50 slabs were heaved on to the truck, whereupon it returned to Winchcombe where this first load was stacked on pallets.

The Transit then returned to Tewksbury another two times, resulting in this most useful stack of 150 slabs at Winchcombe.

We're also on the lookout for imperial blues, should there be any out there that we could have. We need them for the goods platform that is about to be built by the oak tree siding in the Malvern side of the yard.

John, Martyn and Peter K spent the day in the Winchcombe visitor centre fitting 12 acoustic panels to the ceiling.  This was slow at first as setting them out to follow Pete's plan wasn't easy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of the day they were up though. Just got to hoover the floor to suck up all the little bits that fell down from above.

Now let's hope that the panels work.

 

 

 

Mike did some more railing painting, but we haven't got a picture of that as our photographer was in Tewkesbury loading slabs. Well, he can't be in two places at once.

 

A quick catch up from last week too, when Pete, John and Jim H went to Cheltenham.

As the Heras fencing there got blown down in the storm we had, the team had to rebuild it completely. They then had another go at the holes they are digging through a very hard ground for the cast iron gate posts that are intended to be erected there. You seem them digging away here in the picture above.

Picture of.... a hole.

They got the second steel post out, but it fought them all the way.

They spent ages too in further enlarging the first hole.

There is at least another 6 inches of concrete to come out of the hole where the second post was, before it can be used again for the cast iron one. They'll get there, bit by bit though. Persistence does pay.