half century

so this is my 50th blog
seems pretty apt that im back where it started at the world famous festiniog railway

so lets do the apres canada bit quick
got home
2 days later got a job
moved plants , planted plants, watered plants, got a little bit sunburnt for 6 weeks at a local garden centre which was rather good fun
caught up with alll the important people that i hadnt seen in forever
destroyed a certain butler at mah jong

then i jumped in the fiesta and headed on up here
with a couple of brake problems on route

to start with i was just firing a whole bunch as we were short of crews
and i had some great days ( full main valve from ddualt ) and some terrible ( ray ive run out of coal.......... ) in the rain

for the past 5 weeks though ive mainly been fixing the old slate waggons
its a heritage society funded
The first 'fix' we did ( myself and tim ) was to 857 and it needed some spine repairs so we knocked up a couple of fish plates and then had the joy of having to gas axe a hole in the old spine for the new bolts to go in as we lacked a mag drill that fitted in the gap
so a bit of swearing later ( and a bit of die grinding to ummmmm make the holes a little rounder )
we had a nice little fix
although me and a coupling did have a disagreement ( well i just put it on upside down .... doh )

the next day we fixed a couple of faults from the book one of them being some of the brass spacers in one of the couplings on a 3 tonne wagon was absolutely shot to bits luckily tim found a couple of spares in our racking in the hlf shed so after cleaning up the buffer we fitted them and roberts your fathers brother we had got 2 done in a weekend

the next wagon to be fixed was another gwr wagon which needed a similar repair to 857 and me and bruno knocked that one off pretty quickly

the wagon after the gwr one was a lnwr wagon with an interesting lms axle box ( complete with brass cover phhwwwooooarrrhhh ) this one was a little more complex as it needed an entire new spine and frame stretchers
as the original spine was made of rail we decided to make the new one out of rail
so off me and emma went to go steal an old piece of double head rail
it cut in the band saw nice and easy but that was the end of the easy bit
due to the lip which the floor sits on we had to cut a corresponding bit out of the rail and which took a while due to all the rust and just the thickness of the material
then we made new plates to hold the spine in to the old substructure and we had to make new keep plates to go over these
emma was fantastic with her doing all the welding
we had various cleaners / younger volunteers helping us out on these wagons teaching them the first steps needed to keep the fleet running

in this time those last 2 wagons have gone for shot blasting
weve run a gravity train
got nearly 4 more wagons ready for shot blasting but ive got to go as ive got some wagons to fix