The First ‘String’ Course

The latest update from Bob describing the work undertaken last Friday.

Visiting the site for the first time in a week of appalling weather saw us confronted with materials strewn everywhere. Waterproof covers weighted down with concrete blocks had been swept away by the storm leaving the building and materials sodden which makes working with mortar much more difficult. However, today, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and all was well with the world as we tidied up and prepared to start work.

The job in hand today was to begin the installation, along the front of the signal box, of the first of two ‘string’ courses of decorative sandstone that surround the ‘box. These had been beautifully cut and delivered, in a variety of lengths, by our good friend, Graham Walton. Graham specializes in this material and previously supplied us with the sandstone for our award-winning water tower that we built a number of years ago. The large, heavy, expensive lengths of surprisingly fragile stone were manhandled onto the scaffolding and laid out for assessment and measurement in order to minimize waste in the cutting. A longer length was mounted at each end of the ‘run’ and the remaining gap measured and fitted with appropriately sized pieces.

The soaking wet stonework made it difficult to persuade the heavy pieces to stay exactly where they were placed, but patience and a degree of cursing won in the end as you can see from the photos. We have several more of these stones to mount yet and, as ever, weather permitting, I will keep you posted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fitting The NER Lever Frame

Image
Hello all! Today we're going to show how the unique North Eastern Railway Central Division level frame recovered from Pesspool Junction will be fitted into the S&DR signal box.  The 1861 box at the end of it's life. Note the additional window to the locking room, seen on the left hand wall in this picture. This is the operating floor plan showing aperture for frame and *indicative* joist locations to accommodate this. Dimensions: Apologies: all dimensions used here are imperial as the equipment and building itself looks to have been designed and built using these. They also work out very nicely! Front to back, the surviving box structure measures 10’ inside the walls. This has been used in this plan, and is assumed to be correct. The aperture for the frame to sit is drawn here as being 6” from the front wall. This is our datum, from which the other measurements are derived. This can be adjusted plus or minus 2”, but will then shuffle the rest of the aperture across. If it
Read more

NER Northern Division Lattice Signals

Image
This is a very challenging blog post to actually write, as there has been a lot of research and work that has turned up new aspects to the story. I shall try to put this together in the order in which we’ve discovered the details! When planning out the scheme, we weren’t sure if the gantry would be able to feature in Phase 1; and upon learning it wouldn’t, we needed a signal to route trains into either the Tebay platform or the Bay platform. In amongst the equipment on site when we got involved was a selection of steel lattice posts (as an aside, there *were* wooden lattice posts trialled by the Midland Railway…). These were all North Eastern Railway, Northern Division signals, that had originally been on the Newcastle to Carlisle line. Brampton had been mentioned as their original location, but that was not important at this time. Besides the three straight posts was a bracket signal, sat on top of the concrete sleeper pile, which looked to be a good bet; albeit requiring some consi
Read more

The Rafters – Part 1

Image
A couple of nice days over the weekend saw the signalbox acquire a somewhat skeletal appearance as we added the rafters to the previously erected ridge beam – a string line top and bottom ensured that everything was nicely lined up end to end so that the tongue and groove close boarding that will sit on top will be nice and flat and provide a splendid base for the slates.  On completion of this task, someone suggested taking down the string lines until some ‘wag’ suggested that the rafters might follow! So we left them in place! It may look like an unorthodox build process seeing as we have not yet completed the gables, but the slope of the rafters is required for me to accurately build the gables to profile and also to position the very large wooden purlins that will bear a large part of the weight of the roof.  The rafters on the backside will require a little more tailoring, I think, as the original rear wall on which they will sit varies in thickness, is not perfectly straight and
Read more