Saturday 12th - Winding down for Christmas? Not For Some

 A round dozen of us signed in today to keep the show on the road in the run up to Christmas. Apart from the one door still off the coach and being worked on, RMB 1808 is really nearly getting there. I started off with a spot of lining out, second top-coating the recently fitted door and then brightening up some of the panelling. Some of it was looking a bit anaemic and washed out to begin with.

Before and after, that's more like it! A sand down, re-stain and varnish was all done in quick succession. Another coat should finish that panel off nicely, the other doors received the same treatment last week. As I was on a roll I carried straight on into the north vestibule with the same treatment:

A nice gleam again. The southern vestibule is not so bad but just a coat of varnish will be a noticeable improvement there too, and it'll give us something to do while we wait for the last door to be attached. It's true what they say, stand still for 5 minutes in the paintshop and it'll be painted!

Russ meanwhile was continuing on his mission to improve the appearance of the serving area. 

It's really looking the biz now. It's always nice when we can do more than just paint the outside with these quicker refurbishments.

Dave also began tidying up doors, out with the wire wool to clean up the door locks and striker plates. Before I could take a picture he'd finished that, and moved onto some window sliders for BSK 34929:

The pile of bits and pieces of wood all needed their next coat of paint, mostly gloss black today, Pam obliged and took care of the lot:

CK 16221's bogie in the workshop was a focus for activity today, Ian was making quite a cloud of dust when I went past:

While Andy was doing similar on the other side:

Alan decided he'd be better off cleaning up some detachable bits to get out of the dust cloud, this is part of the spring hanger assembly.

There's 2 motivations to get this bogie work done fairly soon, firstly, come the winter shutdown the dirty gang will want to be focussing on jobs for the operational fleet, and secondly, it's currently occupying the wagon space in the workshop, with the Mink A waiting patiently outside to come in:

Also shunted in today was TSO 4867. This has been undergoing minor works in the yard for some time, and the opportunity was taken to bring it in and see what we could get done in the time available, seeing as we had an empty spot in the barn for a little while. 3 window frames came out in fairly quick succession, and here Tony is cleaning up the metal with an angle-grinder.

You can see the bottom right hand corner is looking a bit religious, hopefully someone will oblige during the week and sort that out with some new metal.

By the end of the day the red oxide had been out, and one window frame was back in for a test fit to drill all the holes. It'll come out again to refit the glass, but it's more convenient to sort out all the holes for fixing before that.

Dave H is inside puzzling over fixing points. I presume this coach will be sent out again during the shutdown and may not come in properly for some time yet, but doing bits here and there when we can keeps things ticking along so when its turn finally comes, suddenly we find actually quite a lot is done already.

Bob couldn't resist making a start on the roof too:

I'm sure it won't be long before Dave starts making some noises about starting some tentative body prep on this, but for now, the CK still has plenty of that, George carried on up on the mobile platform today:

It's all to easy to focus on the lower body panels when you're stood at ground level, but passengers are always up on a platform when viewing our carriages, so the upper bodyside needs to be just as good.

As is customary, we watched a train or two go by, 2 steam locos were out today each doing 2 fully booked round trips to go and see Father Christmas, although I managed to get 4270 twice:

In all the excitement last week of being back I forgot to mention my lockdown project, painting up a couple of new headboards for the revised format "Sant Experience". It was very satisfying to see them take pride of place, here's one of them just after I finished them at home in November: