Saturday 26th - Summer already?

 The day before British Summer Time kicks in, but it certainly felt very summery today, Dinmore basks in the morning sunlight as she steams past us:

First thing there was a gathering around the CK to discuss doors:

Or alternatively, 1 working, 3 supervising!

One outcome was to commission John to make some of these rectangular plates, which he duly obliged:

 

Dennis was on his own today on the third rake, continuing the clean-up operation:

Upholstery continued their two fronts, Jenny and Laura on bubble car seats:

While John worked on the next RBr chair:

Back down to see how the door team was progressing, Ainlsey was on the pillar drill with some door furniture bits:

While Robert and Ben and moved onto the end door to investigate:

Come lunchtime we all abandoned the mess room to enjoy the sunshine outside. With our benches still under repair we all headed to the station, which looked pleasingly busy. The new timetable is perfectly matched to our lunch break, so we watched 4270 stop right in front of us:

It would have been quite easy to spend the rest of the afternoon sat out in the sun, but we dragged ourselves back to work. Ken found some quarterlights off of the RBr to play with:

And a look inside  the CK late in the day showed Simon and Steve were making great progress in panelling the corridor:

You can't really see from the pic but there's a lot more windows with panelling around them than are behind me without!

I had a fairly genteel morning working on the latest station sign, this one for Cheltenham:

Dave marched out and completed the first top coat of the GPV:

We both finished off the day with some sanding down of the bubblecar:

It was just Paul on the Toad today, priming some more of the emptied ballast boxes:

On my way to Toddington Wednesday afternoon I stopped by to see that some concrete blocks had been cast as replacement ballast:

Which segues nicely to our activities at Toddington Wednesday evening. This was to be our first riveting session on the tank wagon chassis, and a team of four of us cracked on. getting too many pictures of this wasn't easy, when you're dealing with hot rivets you haven't really got time to hang around to take pictures! 

We worked well as a team, Mark H was 'cooking' I was rivet runner, Mark Y held the bottom of the rivet while Ian came in on top to do the noisy bit:

Working our way along the outer edge of the solebar was relatively easy, but the inside edges were much more challenging for access!

A little under 2 hours later and we'd done about 25 rivets, about 1/5th of the total we think:

That was enough riveting, but there was still some other bits to do. We soon had our shiny new rivets in primer:

And Mark drilled out the last of the holes with the mag drill:

Greg and I meanwhile dug out the timber baulks for the tank and had them all in undercoat:

With the riveting being more challenging than expected, we're still not sure if this will be ready in time for the gala goods train, but we'll do our best and see what we can do. Hopefully there should be several new additions since last year either way.