Saturday 5th - We're back!

 Hurrah! It was good to get back to it all again, although of course some people had never gone away, maintenance of course, but also a couple of people still plugging away at the doors for the RMB. It was great to come back and see that they were all on.

Here Chris is fettling the last one. In the end it had to come off again for some more drilling, but we're nearly there with this coach now. John H finished off fitting the capping stirp for the centre door so it's over to the painters now.

Dave's focus was on another door that had had all its fettling done, and required a bit of tidying up around the newly fitted door handle.

I top-coated the last lower panel in chocolate, as well as rubbed down and re-stained and varnished the doors on the Cotswold side, both of which I completely forgot to take pictures of. However, I did remember this, which was my main object of the day:

That final translucent shadow really makes it stand out doesn't it? It just needs a coat of varnish now and then we need to try and get all 3 of them to Broadway. They really are quite cumbersome, so we think by train is probably the only way.

Staying in the paintshop, but with bits and bobs for the BSK in the workshop, Alan was painting the battery boxes:

Meanwhile Pam was on ceilings.

Onto the BSK itself. Plans sometimes change, and we realised that it would make more sense to have the BSK in maroon. Luckily only the window frames had been undercoated, so Ainsley set about correcting that with some undercoat madder.

We're edging closer to it being time to paint this vehicle fully, but window frames can be undercoated as soon as the frames are put back in without impacting on anything else so they're often painted ahead of the rest.

The CK wasn't being ignored either, with Bob and Dave H both cleaning up more parts:

While Alan was in the barn cleaning up more brake linkages:

I didn't want to disturb him!

The main task for Ian and Andy was a fairly big shunt:

The aim was to extract a GWR Mink A that had some spare parts for the CK in. We also decided it would be a good candidate for the next wagon restoration, as it was formerly a runner in the freight train. Unfortunately it was fairly near the back of a long siding. So the whole of what was the freight train had to be dragged out and split, as the headshunt in the other direction wasn't long enough to accommodate it all at once.

However, they got there in the end:

It's not in the works yet, but it's been brought over to our side of the yard in preparation. It looks like it'll be a case of replacing all the wood for new as it's just a little bit too far gone, which will see it good for many years. Hopefully this will be the start of a more regular rolling restoration programme for our wagons, with a view of trying to get a proper operational freight set again over the next couple of years.

All the shunting was also a great opportunity for me to grab some pictures of the wagons on the railway for the wagon list page on the blog. It's now up, with a similar format to the carriages one, so click on the link at the top to take a look. Every wagon on the railway has a record (I think!) and a little over half have a picture too.

Before we went home Dave and I went to watch the last train leave back to Toddington as dusk fell:

Definitely something about steam at night that really does it!