GWSR Broadway Developments

The question came up at the volunteers meeting, and the chairman didn't know yet.
He did explain that generally speaking as we have resident locos with a contractual number of annual steaming days for which the railway pays them, you can't get too many guest engines (except for galas of course) as that will dilute the number of available days for the residents. That said, the number of steaming days needed will be up with the new timetable.
When a loco goes off site and steams somewhere else (eg 2807 at Llangollen) that does count as a steaming day though.

In reply to the question, he also said that the first passenger train out of Broadway would be headed by Foremarke Hall. Firstly, it is a vote of thanks to our own loco group, and secondly, it faces the right way! (south)

So there you go, all very logical. It was a good meeting, all very positive.

NB Do not try to park at Broadway station, or along the road. Until +/- August 2018 when the new car park is likely to open across the road, the nearest car park is off the Childswickham Road, a fair walk away (about 15 mins). Get on somewhere else is the advice. The station forecourt is tiny and the few spaces there are for the handfull of staff and a couple of disableds. Do not even drive up there to have a look, once we are open! You may well get stuck, and block the narrow road for the people that live there. At least negotiations for a bigger car park have borne fruit, so well done the plc board.

We inherited a forecourt designed in 1904 to allow a horse and cart to drive up, turn round and go back down. That's it. Stay away with your motor car.

 

Modern motor motor cars do not fit well into any heritage arena. Maybe you could get this going and have cars park some distance away

If that is too adventurous then maybe this:

 

Blimey! That first pic looks like the legendary Clapham Omnibus! Could it really be?

Hopefully I'll only need to park my car on the Sat and Sun and I'll be doing that at Toddington (staying in Tewkesbury Fri and Sat night, then staying in Winchcombe on the Sun night). How long is the walk from Broadway Station into the town? From memory it's about 10 mins for a reasonably quick walker.

 

2999?

 

Ooh yes please!

 

We had a gala committee meeting on Saturday (over 3 hours) all o can say at this stage is that negotiations are ongoing with locomotive owners and that as soon as we have some positive news we will let everyone know. We’ve allowed for three guest locomotives in the budget which should push all the right buttons. A draft timetable has been produced which has I believe 10 Trains going to broadway. I’m sorry were unable to say any more at present, it’s not for lack of trying!

 

Ballast dropping resumed today, in the stretch from Pry Lane to the Broadway goods shed.
You can see a video of it here:

Two train loads of 6 Dogfish each were discharged. One more will see us up to the Broadway southern turnout.
At the moment we are prevented from crossing the Station Road bridge due to the strike repairs going on, but the contractor is doing well and it shouldn't be too long before we can enter the station itself again, to do Broadway north and platform 2. A bridges blog update should be available tomorrow afternoon late.

I updated the extension blog as well, with inter alia news of 76077 and a shot of the canopy extension foundations. All good fun, we are going places!

 

Great to see a close-up of the Shark in action!
That wind sounds both cold and incessant.

 

It is a shame in some way that the Caravan Park (former goods yard) is there as this might have given space for Parking and other facilities. Was this sold off by BR or by the GWR themselves ?

 

It was sold off a long time ago, but the Goods Shed was in GWSR ownership until relatively recently.

 

A first report on the Broadway bridge strike repair has now been posted on the bridges blog:
http://bridgestobroadway.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/broadway-bridge-strike-repair.html

Here are a couple of pictures of the damage:



This buckled girder sits directly underneath one of the rails.



Can you imagine the force required to buckle a sandwich of three heavy plates like this? And this was not the point of first contact, but a girder in the centre of the bridge, i.e. a secondary strike.

The pounding our bridge gets, at least 12 strikes of varying severity since the refurb in 2014, has forced a serious think about our options, and something will be done.

 

That is serious damage! What is the speed limit under the bridge? But I guess an idiot who doesn't know the height of his load is unlikely to obey a speed limit anyway.............

 

The speed limit is 30 mph. However, the bridge is at the bottom of a slight slope either way, and the actual speed of the majority of vehicles here is higher. It is quite easy to do 40 mph, just by closing the throttle at the top of Pennylands bank (Evesham Road) and rolling downhill.

 

Is it possible to erect sacrificial girders either side of the bridge. If there is an overheight vehicle it gets caught by the girders not the bridge itself

 

If I read the blog correctly, that was unknown time and therefore presumably the vehicle involved didn’t report it? The mind boggles at the state of damage to the vehicle involved, or how you could think you’d no need to stop!

Tom

 

How about attaching a few spikes to the girder to impale offending vehicles so they can't drive away.

(this is not a serious suggestion, just a slightly evil thought )

 

I think there's possibly two reasons why they don't stop.
1. They aren't bright enough to realise they've damaged the bridge, even though the strike must have been felt and made a huge noise.
2. They're bright enough to know that if they stop they could have to pay for the bridge repair as well as the damage to their lorry.

 

That is appalling. The mind boggles at the damage which must have been inflicted on the vehicles concerned in all these strikes. how they managed to limp away from the scene, god alone knows.
One could imagine the ribs of the Titanic looking a bit like this after its altercation with the iceberg. A pair of real **** off bash-beams, preferably with very sharp leading edges is surely the only prevention for this

 

It's not the vehicles that get damaged, but the load. And the load, in the worst case, is an excavator with a thick steel arm sticking out. That is what did the damage in the pictures. It's just 6 ins across, but solid steel.
The others were lorries carrying skips. These tend to rip off the rivets from underneath.
I actually photographed one after he hit the bridge. He was zig-zagging away backwards up Pennylands bank. We managed to stop him at the next roundabout, and he denied hitting the bridge!
Believe me, when you've heard a bridge strike, you know what it was. The noise is unmistakable.

 

It must be like a thunderclap.