Ice cold today ! Minus 3 degrees at the start, and ice patches everywhere. No brick laying therefore, but that didn't bother us, as we were going to do a day's back filling anyway.

An early visitor to CRC2 was the lorry delivering a 1T dumper and the mini digger. It looks nice and sunny, but at this hour of the day it was literally freezing, and we pulled our hats down well over our ears. The dumper was one of those special 'thin' ones, that we know just about fits behind the platform.

An early job for the mini digger was to get above the platform, and dig a short length of trench for the pipe that feeds the electrics for the former waiting room area. A bit hairy, as you can see. Luckily we have a skilled driver in JC.
As far as we (our team) know, nothing is planned to replace the demolished waiting room at the moment, but after clearing up last week we could see that there had been two toilet pans there, so maybe in the course of time we will put some sort of a (historical!) building there. The original one was very basic - a room to shelter, and two loos, that's it.

This pictures shows JC cutting off a suitable length of pipe, and it also shows the area to be back filled, in the first instance. We have laid a drain, covered in pea gravel, up to where Bob is standing.

In this picture Tony, supervised by JC,is filling in the trench after extending the pipe that has already been laid under the wall we built. Job done. Of course now the dumper has to negotiate this obstacle, which was tricky.

While the pipe laying team was occupied, four of us decided to make use of the dumper and attack one of the two remaining groups of pallets of blues up above. We managed to get access through the car park field, and a removable panel on the fence at the back. This arrangement with the dumper worked rather well, we were pleased to see, and of the 5 piles on this spot, we managed to move 3 1/2 today. That leaves a total of 13 1/2 pallets to deal with, from a grand total of about 80.

Then, before you knew it, it was lunch time ! Although the air temperature never rose above +3 degrees, we discovered that it was actually pleasantly warm by now in the sunshine, so we had our snap outside. Lovely looking at Cleeve Hill with the blue sky, accompanied by Robins and a Wagtail. And.....

As you sit outside in the sun discussing world events, all sorts of stuff flies past.

Here is an Apache, one of 5 that flew by over the signal box. I'm glad this thing is on our side ! It packs a lot of punch.

Then the serious dumping started, we had a big pile of former L/C spent ballast to remove from the field, and carefully drive it along the back of the platform from the 170m section to the 100m area. The last 30yds were very tight, as the new drain and accompanying scaffolding boards made the available width just about as wide as - the dumper.  We wriggled through somehow, didn't smash a single one..

At the same time a second team consisting of Derrick (loading) and John O with Brian (pea gravel train) supplied Tony, Bob and John S with the pea gravel infill behind the scaffolding boards. It's all done with a bucket, and somewhat time consuming, but it does work and we did what we set out to do, about 30m's worth.

This view shows you pretty much what we infilled today. It doesn't look much, but it's two layers, the first of which was started with barrows (!) as the digger couldn't start straight away. Once we had the first layer in, the journey with the dumper became a little easier, but then we had a 'lift' on the scaffolding boards, for a second pour of pea gravel. Where you can see Tony standing is in fact on the second layer.

From the photographer's point of view the light was very awkward, as the sun never rose high enough to light up the inside of the trench. It was only at the end of the day, as in this last picture, that the light was even, with the sun disappearing again behind the trees. It also immediately became a lot colder again!

Here we see Tony and John, who had shovelled all day, distributing the last load of the day that was brought in. The infill already looks quite high, doesn't it? Well, we think it does.

The foreground shows the scaffolding board raised for the second layer of pea gravel, and the tracks of the dumper bang in the middle of the very narrow space available. Once we are above this layer, it will get a lot easier.

We didn't finish the pile today - not enough time. At the time of writing we are considering an extra day tomorrow, Tuesday.
Wives permitting, of course ! Very important.