A fine day at last, ideal weather for brick laying. Most of us got to CRC2 rather late (by half an hour in my case) because of some horrendous snarl up round Bishops Cleeve. But we got there in the end, to find the local boys John and Bob already well at work.

Shortly afterwards, Richard from Fairview came with a welcome supply of corbelling bricks, and 5T of sand. We get through this stuff with amazing speed, and every pound of it is barrowed to the coal face, mostly by John O. Well done, John !
After a while, Bob and John confessed that they had also done a little Saturday session, and revealed that between them they had put a second course of corbelling on the 110m section,and a final header course on the 120m section.

At the beginning of the day; work on all three sections proceeds.

So today we already had a little head start, and the day's progress was boosted by the presence of once again 8 volunteers - we seem to have quite a regular crew.

E6036 draws out the wagons from Hunting Butts.

The exciting bit today was that we had a PWay train headed by the class 73 come to sort out some wagons from the Hunting Butts headshunt. Of course the wagons you want are right in the middle, or even at the very end, so rather than just come and pick them up, the class 73 first ended up with a very long train indeed of all sorts of wagons, some of which had been on fire thanks to our local vandals. Much shunting backwards and forwards ensured, before the correct vehicles had been extracted and formed into a short train. The wagons are required to carry the rail we are buying from the Laverton headshunt up to the Broadway extension railhead, so you can see that there are definite signs of movement here now. I wonder if the share issue has raised enough money to pay for the bridges, as well as for the rails? It's not impossible, as the issue has now breached the £500.000 mark. Wonderful, to get such support.
In between, brick laying continued. Bob put down the final row of corbelling on the 110m section, which was swiftly backed up by Tony and Pete, so that at the end of the day, we can declare this next section - finished!

The 110m section nears completion in the hands of Tony and Pete. A proud moment. Note the empty (-er) Hunting Butts headshunt behind!

Bob then moved on to the 130m section. This is the current end one, and here he added two rows of blues. On the cutting side, John S backed this up with two courses of reds. At the end of the day, we had laid 750 bricks in total, pretty good going for a day's work.

During the day a second team of three (Derek, your scribe and Brian) brought down additional backing up bricks from the top of the cutting. These were essentially the second hand reds and yellows that had been scattered about the field by our traveller visitors, and gathered up again and stacked inside the fence by Bob Stark and his men. We brought down two stacks of reds, and a stack of yellows, about 1300 bricks in all. We were very tired at the end, with only 3 men on the job. Basically this means that each part of the logistics is performed by only one man, so it feels as if you have done everything yourself, e.g. picked up every single brick from the stack, or put every single brick on the trolley.

In this picture, you can see Derek picking the bricks off the trolley and passing them to Brian, who is stacking them behind the current working area ready for immediate use.

Wot? Me? All these?

When we say immediate use, this means the pressure is on John to get on with it, as the stack behind him grows ever bigger...

While all this brick moving was going on, the class 73 was shunting to and fro at the tunnel mouth, and we worried in case it might finally decide to pull away with its newly formed train, and want to run around. We didn't want to get tooted at with our trolley. We kept a wary eye on the loco, even having lunch in order to give it a chance to appear. Eventually it did, pulled in with 5 wagons loaded principally with (unwanted?) bullhead rail and ran round with the Toad. It tooted, we waved, all very slow and friendly.

Finally the PWay train was ready. Neil and Malcolm shared a few words, and it was off. You can see it leave here:
http://youtu.be/Mh-5SkLP2Uk
Not a massively exciting video, but it's a bit of a milestone as it signifies the start of the Broadway extension. We are on our way !