Saturday 8th - Different Hats

 It was a grim day to be train crew, but that's exactly what Andy and I were rostered as this morning before we could swap hats and retreat to the shelter of the C&W workshops. We had P&O up front, and Dave managed to capture the loco...

...Andy...

...And me...

...As we rolled past. Andy is soon to hang up his guard's hat after many years but staying on as TTI, while my guard's training is well advanced now having been interrupted by the pandemic, so it may not be long before our roles are reversed.

We made it back to Winchcombe just in time for lunch, and then got stuck in ourselves. For me, that meant finding out what everyone else was up to!

I headed straight to the Mink to see how that was looking. Paul was doing some more painting on the frame, there didn't look to be much left:

There's not too much more to do on the frame now, the benefits of shot-blasting, it eradicates weeks of work cleaning up the frame. We're just waiting for a new storage container to be delivered so we have somewhere to store the timber.

I spotted later that a lot of the ironwork had found its way onto the painting tables and was also in undercoat:

Out in the barn Andy was busy trying to extract some copper from some electrical generator bits that we don't use as part of our electrical system:

Dismantling proved rather harder than anticipated, so out came the angle grinder, with only limited success!

A little later on, another set of bogies were brought in on the jack road:

Lurking around taking blog photos always carries the risk of getting roped in, and sure enough those covers needed taking off:

In the workshop Richard was preparing the next section of CK16221 for greying up, probably on Tuesday:

And George was cleaning up the end:

It's heartening to see so much door activity on 34929 with our revitalised door team; Ainsley was cleaning up one door having managed to put all the hinges back on in the right place:

While Robert was adjusting another door pillar:

Before testing its fit with Steve:

Chris was on the opposite side with some clamps to get this door pillar to fit in place too:

Upstairs John and Jenny were busy puzzling over the best way to cut out the mocquette for minimal wastage in making some more side rests:

I joined in the progress too, with all the woodwork done in the toilet compartment we need to get it painted up before Phil can fit the toilet itself. So I got a very thick blanket to protect the new lino (get paint on it on pain of death!) and broke out the primer:

Once that was done I joined Dave and Pam who were painting seat heater grills in silver hammerite. They're quite fiddly and hard to paint, but we got them all done by the end of the day ready for fitting.

Lastly, I noticed we sailed past 100,000 views of this blog since we set it up in September, so thank you! We really do appreciate the interest.