Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway Steam Loco Dept Blog: A Streetcar Mess Coach named Tina

As promised in last week's blog, Tina arrived wearing make-up and ready for her photo shoot with the mess coach which has recently been named after her.

~~Fame~~ Frame at last

Just in case she forgets her name

All she needs now is lining out and she'll be finished.... that's Tina the mess coach of course, not Tina the fireman.

Not everybody gets their name on something as prestigious as a mess coach, Ben for example only warrants a wheel barrow:-

Ben's barrow

When interrogated on the matter later, Ben claimed to know nothing about the fact that he now possessed his own personal wheel barrow, nor did he know who might have put the writing on it. I was at least pleased to note that whoever the culprit was had correctly used an apostrophe. Judging by the standards of punctuation in the comments left on various forms of social media, that eliminates a fair proportion of the possible suspects. Having said that, I now fully expect that the punctuation police and grammar Gestapo will be analysing my every word in the hunt for any mistakes that I might make. People in glass houses etc.

Continuing with the subject of naming things after people, I can't fathom out who the austerity that has been loaned to the Avon Valley Railway was named after. We don't seem to have too many Earls named David in the steam loco dept.

Just who was this loco named after?

Anyway, back to the plot. Saturday was a crew training day, Cliff would be out driver training on 5542 whilst Chris would be training as a fireman on Foremarke Hall. Dan cleaned 5542 whilst I got to work on with Foremarke Hall.

Dan gives 5542's safety valve bonnet a bit of therapy with the Brasso

Cliff caught oiling up 5542

Chris about to set off on Foremarke Hall

Cliff a bit later in the day after what was clearly an enjoyable day learning to drive 5542

Ade was Chris's firing instructor, but he still lent a hand with cleaning some of Foremarke Hall's brass work:

Ade buffs up the brass work

5542 & Foremarke Hall, not long before leaving shed

Once they were gone, Dan had to sit his 'Shunting & Yard Safety' exam. I have to sit it myself in a month or so, and consequently I was interested to learn how he got on. Needless to say, Dan romped through the exam with no trouble at all, even though the pass mark is 90%. When I come to sit the exam, whilst it is technically possible that I could do better than Dan, I'd have to get every question right to do so. Dan is a very tough act to follow.

There was still plenty left to be getting on with around the yard whilst the trains were off down the line:

5542 setting off with Cliff at the regulator

2807 needed a bit of a clean up. Once again there were three locos out on the Sunday, but only one cleaner booked on. It would be something of an act of kindness to at least make a bit of a head start on cleaning her, so I spent a short while doing that. It had also been noticed that one of the planks that retained the gravel of the walkway to the wood store was starting to raise up above the level of the track. Dan & I disassembled it and put it back together so that it was now flush with the rail head.

Before

After

On the subject of the path to the wood store, my less than subtle hints seem to have been heeded and stock is now rarely to be found blocking it. That might of course owe more to the fact that several items of stock have left the railway completely or temporarily disappeared off to other railways to take part in their mixed traction galas.

The wood store had been a bit light of wood when I arrived, but there was a considerable stock of old pallets waiting to be broken up. More arrived later on the back of a starfish wagon which had been sent up from Winchcombe during the week with more wood for the wood store.

Ben unloading wood from the starfish

The wood store is now replenished and should last a little while now. The parking brake on the starfish had been noted as being defective, so a small team of people took a break from breaking pallets to fix the parking brake instead:

Somewhere under there, the parking brake is being adjusted

The process did seem to require rather more people to spectate than actually do the work.

I bumped into Andy Marshall of the 35006 group who informed me that all his volunteers inconsiderately away on holiday this week. I wonder if they went south.

Even the Southern Railway can't always get the use of apostrophes right

Before they had all disappeared off in search of the sun in what was probably more of a triumph of hope over experience, the 35006 team had started work on installing the motion on the right hand side:

The recently installed combination lever and union link

You're impressed that I knew that those bits were a combination lever & union link weren't you! Be impressed no more. I'll confess to having first checked on Google (thereby informing the CIA of my ignorance) and when it turned out that Google wasn't my friend after all, looking it up in a book, not even a Kindle, but a proper old fashioned book with real pages. Who needs this 21st Century technology!

And finally, I was being slightly disingenuous earlier when I said that Chris Brooks was down for a fireman training turn. In fact, Chris was down to be assessed as a fireman. I am extremely pleased to be able to inform you that Chris did indeed pass out and is now a fully qualified fireman. I had expected when I was asked to kick off this blog that I would find plenty to fill the pages keeping the world informed about people passing out as firemen (mostly by the name of Chris to be honest, there are a lot of them in fireman training) or drivers, yet here we are more than half a year down the road and Chris Brooks has turned out to be the very first to get through in all that time.