A bright cold start in Tywyn this morning, but due to a forthcoming school visit to the Railway and Museum, much of the work took place indoors. However Charles Benedetto and Pete Thomas took the covers off the Corris mail waggon, as the Weighbridge will be demonstrated to the school children, and stowed it in preparation for the visit.
Max Birchenough and John Olsen were joined by Gerald Grudgings in the museum where Max laid down newspapers and masked off the floor adjoining the yellow edging around the Woolwich Arsenal wagon and commenced refreshing the scuffed paint. John and Gerald went upstairs to place the two white painted plywood panels on the floor and laid out the five centennial and sesquicentennial loco headboards on them to establish where each mounting bracket would be fixed. The brackets were being fixed in position when Charles and Pete completed their job and came inside to clear the stone chippings from a piece of the display in front of the FR coal wagon; in preparation for securing the new milestone mount.
We adjourned to the cafe for morning coffee with Ann McCanna, Tom Place, Andy Sheffield, Keith Theobald, Mike Green and David Broadbent, who was on very light duties due to doctors orders.
Refreshed we returned to the museum where Max continued his painting and Pete drilled the fixing holes for the milestone mounting. Charles and John set up the scaffold tower on the first floor by the beam that the plywood panels were to be secured to, with Gerald as their ‘goffer’. Once the panels had been secured by a combination of countersunk bolts and self tapping screws, each bracket was levelled with a spirit level and the remaining three fixing holes drilled out. As each bracket was fully secured the appropriate headboard was passed up by Gerald and put in position. The final task was to re-attach the cable conduit, between the two Tyers block token instruments, to the beam.
There was a bit of a hoohah downstairs when Max discovered that the paint tin had perforated through the bottom and paint was leaking out. Some paint got onto various shoes and dripped from the sopping newpapers, so it had to be washed and scrubbed off the slate tiles and rubber flooring before it set too hard. Then a general tidy up commenced that saw some items returned to the Gunpowder Store and the scaffold tower dismantled and stored under the stairs before we stopped for the morning.
Photos by John Olsen