Saturday 18th - A very productive day

 A good day today, with a number of significant jobs ticked off, along with a very productive meeting with our HR director about some future plans.

First job then, steam heat pipework on FK 13329 in the barn. John was back and Stuart had very thoughtfull done all the grotty bits of chopping out the rubbish bits of pipe, leaving John and Andy to claim all the glory with the nicer job of cutting the new bits of pipe...

...And putting it all back together, complete with 'sheep's head' fitting. Another leak ticked off the list and a job well done.

Naturally the drawhooks are coming out for a tail pin change, Ian and Clive lower down the buckeye.

Later on and the main drawhook is out, with Andy giving it a scrape. 

Spot the new component!

Indeed the dirty gang were on such a roll today they even started taking apart the drawgear on the other end, altohugh it was a bit late in the day to be doing the heavy lifting Clive and Andy did all the prep.

Tool van 92 is inching towards completion, Chris was going round with the glue and canvas offcuts to seal in those corners of the frames, before a liberal coating of flexacryl goes over everything.

While Maurice and I worked our way round battening the canvas down either side.

A pretty neat job if we do say so ourselves. Just the ends to do now.

Despite it being a busy day in the works, we managed to nip out to see the train go past. Today was a race train going down to Cheltenham with a load of passengers, back empty, a Fish and Chip lunch in the middle with a second load, then go down and pick up the first lot of passengers again.

James was on 'works development' today fabricating a new metal box to hold our big heavy spanners.

Elsewhere on the metalworking front once again Alan was stuck into the North end of FK 13326

I spotted the 3 crash pillars at the South end that are still mostly extant had had new sections tacked in place as well.

Tea break time and something had piqued everyone's interest...

Ah, Phil's got a new toy, the new Accurascale OO gauge Cl.37, very nice!

To the RBr then, and Robert was back on capping strips.

Slow and steady wins the race as ever. Ben in the background at a similar pace.

progress inside is more visually speedy, Simon putting in more panelling.

Onto the SK, just Dave from the painting today, working on tidying up the North corridor connection.

The South end is looking pretty spick and span now, apart from a manky old wooden mounting block for the electrical connector which we decided to have off. Phil sorts out a replacement one.

Just a small amount of shunting today to pull the wagons out from alongside the shed to clear access for the gutters to be cleared during the week.

All formed up but nowhere to go...

That's it for this week, so I'll leave you with a video of P&O bring the merry racegoers back from Cheltenham after dark, just before we left for the day.