Pointless

The 'Parlour Road', which leads into our ash pit had been going to see a bit more concreting to expand the apron around the pit.  Apparently the concreting has been deferred until next year. In the meanwhile, the Wednesday gang have recently been assisting the Permanent Way team in leveling and re-ballasting the track in that area.  Chris Blake has kindly sent me the following photos of the work in progress.

I notice that on that last photo, they appear to be trying to get their Land Rover onto the pit, presumably it's in need of an oil change.

I happened to be passing Toddington on Friday as part of my work, so I thought that I'd call in and see what was going on.  Fridays tend to be fairly quiet, but not so last Friday.

For one thing, a new class 08 shunter had arrived in the car park

 The 08 wasn't the only new thing to have arrived in the car park.  It also turned out to be crammed full of all the paraphernalia associated with producing a big budget movie:

More trucks and vans than you could shake a stick at

For contractual obligation reasons, I'm not allowed to reveal the name of the movie or the leading actors who are starring in it until the production company starts rolling out their own publicity for the movie which will probably be the better part of a year away. 

I can say without fear of contradiction that Foremarke Hall was the leading lady as far as members of the railway are concerned at least:

Foremarke Hall waits for her next scene

My Photoshop skills were put to the test as I needed to remove one of the movie's human stars from the photo above. 

Lights... camera.... action!

Needless to say, the crew were all fired up for their fifteen minutes of fame.  Ben was getting a bit carried away.

Well John was hoping that Ben would be carried away!

 It was a long day with a split shift for the crew.  Ben and John had been on in the morning, Paul and Jamie were down for the afternoon.

Paul, Ben & John being directed by the Director

At least I assume that the lady in the photo above was the Director, she was telling people what they should be doing anyway.  

It wasn't just Ben who was getting carried away, Ian was too. 

There's always one... and it's usually Ian

Note that after Foremarke Hall had paid a visit to the wardrobe department, all they'd decided to do was stick some tinsel around her window frames.  When Jamie turned up at the wardrobe department in his usual footplate gear, they took one look and said "You'll do".  He was pleased to learn that he'd been getting it right all these years.

Needless to say I took several photos of the star of the movie who was present on the platform along with various members of the steam loco dept. He turned out to be extremely pleasant and very approachable unlike one of the characters that he is noted for playing on tv.  Sadly the photos will have to be withheld for legal reasons until much later next year. That fact came as a bit of a blow to Colin Fewell who badgered me for copies of the photos for the Boardroom Blog when he spotted me and my camera.

Friday evening was the night of the Steam Loco Dept's Christmas party.  I notice that some of the other blogs on this railway have provided photographic evidence of what took place at their Christmas parties.  I will spare you the photos and the gory details, I'll  even spare you the name of the person who forgot what he had ordered and was halfway through eating somebody else's turkey before the mistake was noticed. I will however let it be known however that I maintained a long standing tradition of not letting a single sprout (the Devil's own vegetable) past my lips.  Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all, though there were probably more than a few people nursing hangovers the following day. Grateful thanks to Tina for organising the party and to Jonathan Jones-Pratt who provided the raffle prizes (£85 raised for the Broadway appeal).  I wasn't one of those with a hangover however as I needed to be back at Toddington bright tailed and bushy eyed first thing in the morning for a fireman training turn on the first of the day's Santa specials.  

As you may be aware, Ade is my allotted Firing instructor. Nowadays it seems that at the very mention of my name makes him run away screaming.  Instead Cliff was press-ganged kindly volunteered to keep an eye on me in the morning and Clive would take over for the afternoon shift.  It seems that neither could cope with a full day of me.  Jamie, fresh from the high of starring in the movie on Friday was now relegated to driving with a rookie fireman for the day.  Life on the footplate has its ups and downs.

Slightly out of the ordinary was the fact that we had an emergency brake test during the empty coaching stock move to Cheltenham.  One of our inspectors (Jeff) rode on the train and monitored what was going on from the guards point of view whilst the other (Chris) monitored how Jamie (our driver) responded to the communication cord being pulled.  My role in all of this was to make sure that the loco was safe, then wander down the track on the Malvern hills side of the train (complete with token/staff/pilotman, delete as applicable) interrogate the guard as to why we had stopped and then report back to the driver as to what had gone wrong and what we should be doing next. The guard informed me that the communication cord had been pulled in the second carriage and that he would reset it.  Once he had done so, we could then proceed with our journey.  

The brake emergency test put us a few minutes behind schedule. On arrival at Cheltenham however things got worse.  It seems that all the traffic lights in Cheltenham were out of action, the local traffic was more reminiscent of the M25 on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday weekend and to cap it all there had been an accident right outside the entrance to the car park necessitating in at least one person being rushed away in an ambulance.  We were delayed by a good half an hour from our booked departure from Cheltenham as we waited for the last of our passengers to turn up.

At least the local Elves were friendly

The less said about the return journey to Winchcombe the better.  In trying to anticipate the one hour and ten minute layover whilst the kids visited Santa, I under-fired.  We got there ok, but there was much less margin for error than I would have liked.  

The run round of the stock in readiness for the return journey wasn't uneventful either.  The signal to run back onto the train remained stubbornly on.  We should have waited for 5 minutes before I got off the loco and rang the signal box, but I was sent off to ring the signal box long before that.  I suspect that Jamie was a little bit keen to get back into the station and make a start on the tea and mince pies that were being served in the waiting room.  The news was not that the signal man had disappeared from the signal box for a crafty cup of tea and a mince pie himself, but that the electric point motor wasn't playing ball and that the Duty Operations Officer (DOO) had been summoned to move the points manually.  As we couldn't go anywhere, I was dispatched to the waiting room to fetch back tea and mince pies anyway whilst we waited for the DOO to arrive. 

The recalcitrant points

Jamie hangs on to his tea, Dave the DOO moves the points the hard way

Finally, locked in the right position

Finally we were back on our merry way again. The 8F tender's water gauge is marked in thousands of litres.  Clive tried to work out in his head what 18,000 litres was in gallons:

Clive required water cooling as he worked on the advanced mathematics

I didn't have the heart to tell him that there was a small plate on the back of the tender saying that it holds 4000 gallons.  

There was a bit of a cold wind blowing about on Saturday afternoon.  One of our other trainee firemen, Martin, had spent the day on crossing duties at Cheltenham and wasn't slow in coming up onto the footplate to warm up in front of the fire:

Martin, trying to thaw himself out

After that, it was back off up to Winchcombe with another train load of kids hoping for an audience with a certain jolly fellow dressed in red.  The points were still broken, but thankfully Dave was still on hand to move them manually for us.  This time we had over an hour to wait at Winchcombe for our passengers to progress through the grotto.  

You can't fail to have noticed that the television schedule these days is full of various cooking shows of one sort or another, each with its own gimmick vying to get viewers eyeballs to watch the adverts (or buy a tv licence) inbetween the cooking.  I've never understood how they can be so popular, if you could actually eat what they've made that would be ok, but all you can do is watch as somebody else tells you in flowery prose just how good (or otherwise) the food is.  Well, regardless of whether or not I understand its appeal,  if it works on tv, it can work for the GWSR too.  I decided to set off on my own celebrity complete unknown master chef bake off extravaganza.

Sausages on the shovel

After a while and against my expectation, they started to look quite appetising

Satisfied customers

I've heard no reports of food poisoning, so perhaps I even managed to get it right. 

Later on, down at Cheltenham, I arrived with a bit more fire and a bit less water space than I really wanted for what looked like it was going to be an hour long wait.  I was keen that we should run around the train and hook back onto the stock so that I could reconnect up the steam heat and start losing the surplus steam into the carriages.  Of course by the time that we had stopped and I had unhooked the loco from the train, we had eager passengers queuing up to have a look on the footplate.  Jamie and Clive disappeared off to laugh at my predicament whilst I tried to keep the loco quiet and entertain the customers.  There were plenty of children who were impressed simply by peeking in the tender at the coal and then taking a quick look at the fire.  One or two were quite inquisitive and wanted to know which of the controls made the loco start moving, which one stopped it and of course, which one was the whistle.  The last family group left were even more inquisitive than any that had been up on the footplate before.  The elder of the two boys wasn't satisfied with knowing which one was the regulator and which was the brake, he wanted me to tell him what all of the controls did.  When I'd finished, he asked the question, "What happens when it gets to 375?".  375 wasn't a number that rang any bells with me, I was pretty sure that he wasn't referring to the speedo.  I looked towards where he was pointing, it was the pressure gauge, which had the final reading on the scale as being 375 PSI.  Clearly my description of the red line at 225 PSI and the safety valves kicking in had been lost on him.  The only answer I could come up with, was if it ever got to 375, then what would happen is that I'd be disappearing off up the platform as fast as my legs would carry me.  Shortly after that there would be a very loud bang as the boiler blew up, followed by an even louder bang when the members of the Churchill 8F locomotive group found out what I'd done to their lovely engine.

An elf and the mother of the inquisitive boys.

Anyway, they eventually disappeared off happy with their trip to see Santa and with my explanation of why 375 was not a good idea.  We were then able to run round and attach the loco back onto the train again.

Finally reattached to the train, I even managed not to let the 8F blow off in the process

It's hard to tell from this photo, but part of the festive decorations is a set of blue lights on the smoke box hand rail which was anchored on to the hand rails on each side.  At one point in Greet tunnel, Clive could intermittently see one or two of the blue lights as the tinsel on the hand rail blew around in the breeze.  It caused him to wonder if there was a police car in the tunnel.  To the best of my knowledge, bad firing isn't a criminal offence, so I presumed that if it was the police, then I wasn't the person they were after.

It was definitely dark by the time we got back to Toddington.  An electrical failure at Toddington meant that the lights on all of the signals were out.  We were already long behind schedule by now and the need to creep up to each signal and shine a torch at it to find out whether it was on or off didn't help matters at all. 

Finally, the day may have been over for us, but the 8F was booked down for an evening service, so we handed her over to Ade and Derek to cover the late shift once we had emptied the ash pan:

We were done, but the 8F was ready for more