Saturday 23rd April
It could have been the chill weather or the Shakespeare celebrations that had an effect on the number of volunteers today but only 10 of us made it, subsequently, progress was modest.
But to begin a return to Wednesday's and its glorious weather which gave the opportunity to crack on with the bricklaying.
Which in its turn gave the team the chance, in late afternoon on Wednesday, to start laying the first of the first of the window sills. John C, Tony and Peter S are seen carefully positioning the second one to go in, the window frames will soon follow on this wall. The white-ish covering three courses below the sill is a strip of plastic sheer positioned there to prevent mortar dropping on to the plinth headers.
In comparison, today there was only one bricklayer in attendance and the weather was a few degrees down on Wednesday. Nonetheless, Tony persevered and laid a course along the northern gable, and one third of the Cotswold side.
Elsewhere on site Ron, looking a tad surprised, busied himself with keeping the weeds under control so that the remaining bridge parts do not get lost forever in the undergrowth on platform 2.
Steve rolled the Cotswold side of the drive, which had had some holes loosely filled with ballast during the week, while lower down the drive strimming was the order of the day for Peter K and more edging stones were positioned by Ron after moving on from the weed control.
Meanwhile Roger was attempting to remove more of the old tree stumps on the site. The problem with this exercise is that stones tend to hide themselves among the tree roots which causes the chain to become blunt quickly and often although Roger seems to very happy in his work despite this nagging problem.
This is where the station drive meets Station Road so it seems worthwhile keeping the area in good condition and planting a few bedding plants in the bed, being watered in by Stuart. Hope that Jack Frost doesn't pay a late visit and ruin the good work.
A unusual visitor to Station Road garage during the afternoon was what looks to be an ex-army halftrack. Jo took a short film of the vehicle pulling away after filling with fuel which can be viewed on Youtube via this link
https://youtu.be/NSpUkJ-ikBM
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The blog title is from The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare
Good to see progress on the walls,of the station building.Keep up,the good work!.
ReplyDeleteThat particular bond. English bond I think, with with a layer of half bricks crossways looks technically quite challenging. Especially as it is one brick thick. Is it to be backed up with another layer?
ReplyDeleteThanks David
I have a few questions regarding the brickwork. There appear to be a number of differences to that of the original building and other surviving similar examples such as that at Toddington, what reasons are there for this?
ReplyDeleteHere are my observations, a couple of which I believe have been mentioned on this blog before.
1. The bull nosed blue bricks are missing on all of the corners.
2. The bull nosed red bricks are missing from the road side corners of the building.
3. The bull nosed red bricks that go beneath the decorative corner bricks are missing from the corners of the doorways.
4. The decorative bricks around the doors are starting on the second brick above the blue bricks, instead of the sixth as at Toddington.
5. The door frame is set half a brick in length into the building (width of one brick), whereas at Toddington, the door frames are set in a full brick length (width of two bricks).
6. The window sills do not appear to be the same shape as the ones at Toddington (which are shaped to fit in with the moulded bricks above them) and also appear to have been made too short, needing a thick bed of mortar to get them up to the right height.
7. Observing someone else's picture of very recent work at Broadway, I noticed that between two of the recently fitted lintels, the bricks in-between them appear to have been put in with two headers at the bottom and a stretcher at the top, shouldn't the stretcher be on the bottom and the two headers on the top to match the brick courses on the rest of the building?
Here are two images of Toddington station for reference, that show the various details of the brickwork.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Toddington_station.jpg
http://www.daysleeper.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gwr/030517toddington/030517_toddington_29.jpg
I do hope I'm not being an irritating pedant, I can assure you they are just mere observations and are in no way intended to criticise the work being done.
What reasons are there for these differences?
Thank you,
Laurence
Thank you for your interest Laurence, your comments have been noted and will be answered in due course.
Delete