Friday 1st - A Biiiiiig Shunt and another brake van ride

 Before we get to Friday, a few photos I was sent on Thursday, mostly of progress on the Queen Mary. Phil and Jeff were on undercoating duty today, Jeff putting dark grey on the planking (Williamson's don't sell undercoat brown any more before you start wondering if we have alternative livery plans afoot!) while Phil was painting pink!

The pink should hopefully provide a good undercoat for the red, we simply mixed some red in with the white undercoat.

Bob as ever did a superb job of the ceiling on the veranda undercoating that in white:

It was apparently rather wet:

Thanks to Paul for those photos.

Richard also sent a few from the end of the day, the Queen Mary is looking like a liquorice allsorts now with the various undercoats and primers applied:

Lastly the curved sections of planking for the top of the Mink were cut, and the lamp brackets for the QM are progressing:

Now, onto the main event, today's big shunt. The mission (which we chose to accept) was to extract 9 wagons from the sidings just south of Cheltenham Racecourse station at Hunting Butts, in amongst the 65 in total stored down there. We trundled down to Cheltenham with a Class 37 and LMS brake van for the job. It was a wet start to the day for the first few moves:

We assembled the train in platform 1, parking the LMS brake van at the south end with the handbrake screwed tightly on to buffer up against.

Stuff was parked in platform 2 that we didn't want but had to drag out to get to what we did:

Most of what we pulled out are wagons that will be departing the railway, either permanently or temporarily, but this one was for us, a 1907-built GWR Open C:

It had been sat right down in the tunnel for many years, but it's suddenly jumped to near the top of the list as it's an interesting wagon, and the owner is willing to stump up the cash to restore it.

To get to it we had to drag quite a lot else out...

A slightly better view of the GWR Open C. There's a lot that needs restoring!

That was extractions on the left hand road complete, then it was over to the right hand road, for these 2 steel opens:

Here we're up towards the tunnel mouth, we had to drag stuff out in several sections to get this far down:

Typically the last 2 were almost right at the back of a long queue of wagons, in the middle of the tunnel. It was a bit of an adventure to find these; iron ore tipplers:

By this time it had brightened up considerably as a long line of wagons including a rather nice GWR hand crane went past the signal box:

The view from the cab of the Class 37 (well it was better than walking all the way down there!) shows how much siding space there is down here:

Finally after several hours of shunting, our motley collection of wagons were assembled into a train, and everything else put back in the right place:

And then we were off! It's important here for the guard to signal to the driver once the brake van is on the move, 9 loose coupled wagons has some slack to take up and we don't want to snatch couplings by taking off too quickly.

Entering the tunnel...

The best way to experience the tunnel is without a doubt on a brake van!

And out the other side!

At Toddington there was a bit more shunting to do, as the 2 wagons for Winchcombe had ended up in the middle of the consist:

Before we had even set off back they were shunted into the yard out of the way, by the yard 04 all very efficient!

And lastly back to Winchcombe to drop off the brake van, the Open C for restoration, plus a BR tube wagon which will supposedly be providing some spare parts for the former:

All in all, a very successful day, and certainly something different from the ordinary. I think in total we must have moved over 50 wagons, with only a handful right at the back of the tunnel on either tracks not coming out at some point or another.

If you found the idea of a brake van ride along the GWSR rather appealing, then we have good news for you! During the upcoming 40th anniversary gala, we hope to be running a demonstration goods train (with considerably better condition wagons than today's!) where we will be offering brake van rides between Toddington and Cheltenham. No need to pre-book, enquire at the relevant ticket office on the day.

A few of us have been quietly working in the background to make things ready, but there's still a lot to do before a goods train can happen - the Queen Mary is unsurprisingly a key component of that, but there are many other complicated behind the scenes aspects to sort out yet too, so watch this space.