Monday 21st - Inside Out

 Just for a change, a view of the carriage washers from inside the train.

Peter

Steve

The observant amongst you will have spotted that rake 1 is in platform 2. There are operational challenges getting this arranged some weeks, so this is the first time for 11 weeks we have been able to get at it. Coach "A", normally off the platform, certainly showed the problem leaving it this long! The outside team was missing Tim - holiday - so Steve moved from his usual inside cleaning to help out. More on that later.

Mrs Blogger had a dodgy back from picking up the post last week, so I did her usual job of Gteching the carpet in "Mary" and cleaning the tables. Carpet certainly needed a vacuum. But we are hearing numbers of passengers are good so we don't mind a bit of mess. After that Val came through from lower down the train and offered to help, so I left her with the windows to clean while I moved on to further increase the outside team. By lunch break they had only been able to do two-thirds of rake 1, because of coach "A", but with 4 of us on we made good progress after the break. As I changed hats there was some inter departmental assistance with the guys from Broadway changing the gas bottles. The spanner had got dropped trackside so between the various members of the cleaning team we found the "grabber" held in the train and took it to assist. Just as one of the Broadway team had squeezed down and retrieved the offending item! That's our Paul, an ex member of the gas team (age!) looking on. When the trains are this way round both sets of bottles are against the platform. Understandably does not make us popular with the gas team! 

As always the rest of the team were beavering away inside - Greg, John M, Lynn, Nick, Rich, and Roger C. Last man standing was Nigel going through with a mop. Our new man John S is missing - hernia op. Hope it wasn't the cleaning!

This weekend is our Autumn Showcase (and the clocks go back), so time for a last ride on the DMU before it goes to Scotland.