Quite an interesting day today, as we hired in a dumper and a digger, and a large crane lorry came to take away one of our two containers.

The first thing to do was disconnect it from the mains and pull out the reinforced electrical cable.
I said PULL !!!!
A lot of struggling and pulling went on, but without the desired effect. Finally, patience snapped, and larger means were obtained.

After all, we had a mini digger on site, so why not? The reluctant cable then emerged from the undergrowth, and the container was free.
This is our materials container, and we decided to send it to Broadway for storage of joinery delivered, but not yet used. The other reason for its dispatch was to clear up the space it was taking to dig out the platform to level crossing path to its full width. Over the last few Mondays we've been clearing out the container, until there was nothing left inside it.

Yes that's right, there's nothing left in it. This is because we moved all the stuff into our tea hut!

So here we are, forced to drink our tea in the company of 15 sacks of cement. We're sinking pretty low here. End of the day, we're even parking the mixer in here. Just as well that the atmosphere is as good as ever. Just a lot dustier.

Shortly afterwards, the Vic Haines lorry came with its 17T HIAB. Still not strong enough to lift the container from that distance, so need to drag it a bit nearer.

Once it was within a safe radius it was lifted up and placed on the lorry. We shall see on Wednesday if it arrived safely at Broadway, and what colour they will paint it. Not brown as well, we hope, as we now have two, and it is confusing to say that you have put something in the brown container.

Now for the CRC2 work. The two Petes are sent off to the far end of the site to retrieve the shuttering for the last step. Our senior brick layers are privileged to remain standing there, until they return. That's the difference between management, and workers, old as the hills (the custom, not the management).

While the container lorry was setting itself up, Pete and Keith set out the inspection covers for the lamp posts, to make sure they are the correct height and level, for the forthcoming tarmacing exercise. A man with a little wheel came along to measure the platform length (200m, we could have told him that!) and shortly afterwards we should have some quotes for the job. We are going to move this forward now.

At the same time Peter was busy back filling the rear of the slabs we laid along the edge, to make the job look nice and neat.

Despite an awkward commute from Malvern by public transport, Peter was back for his second day on the job. Well done Peter!

We had hired in the digger and dumper for a test day of putting down the penultimate layer on the platform, some fine ballast. We ordered a trial load of 10 tons and spread it out, to see how far it went.

We made ourselves a gauge, so that we could spread the ballast evenly, while leaving a margin of 2ins for the ultimate layer, the tarmac. It was quite a slow job. It's OK to dump and spread the stuff with a shovel, but then it has to be made perfectly level, with no dips anywhere. Although we brought up two big rakes to do this, in the end the best way was for two of us on their hands and knees, spreading the last bits by hand left and right.

Another load arrives, a bit under a tonne at a time. Doesn't the platform look neat now? Almost finished, we are.
At the end of the day, the conclusion was that you got 15m out of a 10T load. Next week we are going to order 60T, and get two dumpers, which will be twice as big (2T load, instead of the 1tonner we used today). A lot of time was spent today slowly bumping along the uneven infill in reverse, so with bigger dumpers we should be more efficient.

This is what the platform looked like at the end of the day. Pretty professional, wouldn't you agree? The inspection cover on the left is just at the right level now. You can also see the last step in the foreground, cast last week. In the picture we're packing up our tools, as we have used up all of the first delivery of ballast, and it's starting to rain more consistently now.

This week's question

Last week's answer was Hurricane, we all agreed. This worked rather well, it is very pleasing to get such help from the community. Thank you all for your most interesting contributions, and reasonings.

This week's question might be a bit trickier.

You might recall that during an archaeological dig on the embankment at Broadway, we have found quite a bit of broken GWR china. The finds seemed to peter out, until we put a proper tool on the job - the 45T excavator! While digging the 15 trenches, quite a bit more china was found in the piles of debris that it extracted. One of the pieces was different form the others - it was flat, white glass, with remnants of black lettering. Then another turned up, and another, until we had 8 pieces.

Cleaned up, and arranged in order, they made up two plates of glass like this:

It looks like CHELTENHAM SPA. The dimensions are 75mm by approx 350mm. There is a shadow around the outside, as if the plates have been inside a frame of sorts. They look too large to have been inside a petroleum lamp, but the white glass suggests they were designed to have been back lit. They were found inside a layer of locomotive ash, inside which were also the GWR china shards, animal bones, and various bottles, even a pricker from a tank engine appeared. The location of this layer of ash was on the shoulder of the embankment alongside the siding by the goods shed, where race trains are known to have been stabled.

So what do people think the name plates are, and how did they get to Broadway? Were they thrown out on the spot, or did they come with the ash from say Cheltenham St James?