Saturday 28th - The final piece of the jigsaw

 Another hectic day with lots of focus on gala preparations. We began the morning with 3 wagons all without drawhooks and associated assemblies. All 3 are the more complex arrangement as opposed to the simple hook - spring - washer - nut arrangement on later vehicles too.

Mark and I headed out to the Gunpowder van to do that one:

We had some new parts made up which you can see at the top of the photo, many thanks to Toddington Machine shop for the quick turn around of the pins.

Underneath the Mink A the cradle which was successfully jacked back into place last week had fallen out again, so the jacks had to come out again and a more solid solution was sorted out:

On Friday I also popped in to sign-write the Mink, which is now looking rather different to this time last week:

The Toad was a little more straightforward on the drawbar front, Clive doing the hook assembly:

Underneath the cradle had moved such that the nut could be wound too far on one drawbar and not far enough on the other, and wasn't terribly interested in moving back again, but jacks soon sorted that out:

While up above, Richard, Maurice and Paul were doing some intermediate repairs to the roof just to allow it to last for the gala, before it receives a brand new one:

So with all the hooks back in, and the vacuum system reconnected on the Toad, it was suggested that the next obvious step was to connect everything up and do a brake test on all 4 vehicles in C&W, so fire up the 03!

It did mean that I couldn't really avoid hiding my signwriting on the Toad any longer, having kept the allocation under wraps all week, here we are:

I don't mind saying I'm rather pleased with that!

The zoomed out view was getting to be something special, with 4 GWR vehicles all lined up together in the sunshine:

This should be about a third of the freight train - I'm definitely getting excited now! Brake van rides, including on the Toad, are first come first served on the day, and I cannot wait for that first goods train into Broadway; an almost entirely GWR train, hauled by a GWR freight loco, into a period GWR station.

Anyway, before all that, does everything work? Well mostly. The toad put up a bit of a fight on the vac brake system, but eventually the brakes did what they were supposed to do, albeit a little slowly. The gauge resolutely stayed at zero though, which would have been the equivalent of an MOT failure.

A basic "switch it off an on again" was tried late afternoon though, and success!

We'll take that.

While all that was going on, in the paintshop the old C&W open day shop was being set up:

So yet another attraction for the gala, as if there wasn't enough to tempt you to visit our C&W works over the weekend.

Whilst I'm sure there was a fair amount going on towards our other existing projects I'm afraid I got a bit caught up on all the wagon related shenanigans today so didn't manage to capture much else, but Dave carried on the outdoor prep work on the Quainton Road TSO, and Steve was in the woodwork shop nailing, erm, something, to, erm, something else...

Sorry, I haven't done very well there!

However, it was a milestone day for Chris, who was once again busy making doors on 16221 fit:

As he received his 15 years' service award today, presented to him by Ian, congratulations Chris!

The other person I caught at work was Robert, who was busy knocking up some pretend sandboxes for the Toad:

 Really the main idea here is just to have some structures around the vac cylinder on the veranda to prevent passengers tripping over things.

Sunday was more overtime for Richard and I to get the Toad ready. After we worked together to fix the floor down, we installed the sandboxes and I got to work with the paintbrush, and Richard posed at the end of a successful extra day:

While I was painting however, Richard was up fixing the roof as best we can just for the weekend:

At least it has a neat edge now and hopefully the canvas won't flap around in the wind any more! It needs a whole new roof really but that will have to wait until after the gala, but crucially fixing it now makes it usable, which makes it a great job done.

Final job of Sunday was to drill and fit the new cast number plates on the solebar, they are a nice little detail to finish things off:

Thanks to Richard for that photo.