Help!

You might just have noticed that I've been quite shamelessly plugging the upcoming Cotswold Steam Celebration Gala at every possible opportunity (and even a few impossible ones) in my recent posts.  The whole thing is pretty much coming together, the guest locos have started arriving, timetables have been published, tickets printed and even the most geriatric members of the steam loco dept have been stirred from their slumbers to take their turn in making it all work.  The plan was actually coming together... at least until today it was.  We have just found out that we can't use the car park at Cheltenham Race Course and that parking will now have to be in the field on the signal box side of the station.  That's all well and good, but neither the Great Western Railway nor BR saw fit to provide the station with a footbridge.  The bottom line is that passengers arriving at Cheltenham Race Course Station by car will need to use the crossing by the signal box to gain access to the platform.  It's usually regarded as bad form to get passengers run down by trains on crossings and quite frankly if they haven't yet got round to buying a ticket, it's bad for business too.  In order to ensure that they make it at least as far as the booking office in safety, we need volunteers to man (or indeed woman) the crossing and make sure nobody comes to grief, or at least no more than we can comfortably dispose of in the firebox of which ever loco hits them.  Consequently, for each day of the gala, we need two willing volunteers (one either side of the crossing) for the 08:00 until 13:00 shift and then another two for the afternoon shift from 13:00 until 18:00.  The steam loco dept is already maxed out, even the cleaners will all still be hard at work at 08:00 making the seven locos running each day shine like new pins and then in the afternoons chaperoning passengers who have brought footplate or brake van tickets.   What we need is a few volunteers from other departments to pitch in and help out.  Any members of the general public I'm afraid are excluded as you will need to be a working volunteer with a current work permit for insurance reasons.  Don't let that put you off visiting us as customers of course, and you'll be more than welcome to help out at next year's gala if you apply to be a volunteer.  Likewise anyone reading this in Central Europe, the Antipodes, China, Russia, the Americas or curiously Kazakhstan (yes the readership of this blog is surprisingly wide and varied) then even if you are working members of the railway, you too can consider yourself excused.

So how do you volunteer for this I hear you ask?  Well that is easy, simply email Paul Richardson at pl.richardson1@googlemail.com and he will be absolutely delighted to hear from you.

Olton Hall AKA Hogwarts Castle on the crossing at Cheltenham

HELP!