Friday, May 15 - Settling Down To A Regular Routine

I was off to a slow start again today.  While I managed to get a decent night’s sleep, I was wide awake at 6 am.  I made a cup of tea (actually 2 cups) and thought about getting up but decided to lay down again.  Three hours later it was 8:45 and I was about to miss the breakfast deadline of 9:15. 

I had left my laptop with Martin of Camberley House the day before so I retrieved it and spent the next hour composing “yesterday”s blog in MS Word, resizing the photos while eating my hearty English breakfast (I skipped the fried bread as that would have really done a number on my stomach!!), as I didn’t have my laptop to do the blog the night before when I had time on my hands. 

Leaving the B&B at 11:00, I made my way to the Library and logged on to the Internet.  First I took a look at my e-mails and Facebook entries.  Then I started to upload the blog.  By the time I had finished it was 11:45 - the morning was almost done!

I made my way to the NNR train station and took the diesel up to Weybourne and the shops.  The NNR shops are divided into 3 unique sections

• Carriage  and Wagon shops (only one shed where the carriages and wagons are repaired/ restored) 
• Locomotive Sheds (only one shed with 3 tracks and lots of pits loaded with steam engines and diesel locomotives in various stages of repair/ restoration)
• the Machine Shop (metal lathes, milling machines, boring machines, drill presses, horizontal band saws, sheet metal equipment - and that’s only the big stuff). 

All under one roof with walls and doors separating the three. 

One has to quickly learn the “lingo”, otherwise one doesn’t catch on to what is being said.  For example, the carriage and wagon shops are simply referred to as the C&W shops.  If you didn’t know what the “C&W” meant, you could easily get lost wandering through the buildings trying to find the lad you needed to get the tools you needed to do the job you needed to do.........

While the NNR is a separate corporate entity with about 45-50 paid part-time employees (with over 120,000 visitors a year, you need to make sure the trains run on time!!) and the M&GN is a separate entity with only volunteers and their own equipment, the lines get a bit blurred between the two. 

Firstly, volunteers wear the same coveralls as the paid workers so you really don’t know who’s a volunteer and who’s an employee.  They all know each other and they trade jokes and conversation back and forth.  We all eat our meals in the same portable mess hall, and we all have our tea breaks together.  If the employee doesn’t make the tea, then it’s a volunteer.  It just seems to be automatic that around 15:15, somebody wanders up to the mess, puts on the kettle, throws a tea bag or two into the tea pot and comes back with enough Styrofoam cups full of tea for everyone.  Everybody knows that it’s only me (volunteer) and Brian (employee) who take sugar in our tea.  You can’t get more intimate than that, eh!?

While the employees only work on NNR equipment, a volunteer could be working on NNR carriage stock or locomotives in the morning and then restoring M&GN carriages or locos in the afternoon.  As long as you sign in immediately upon arriving and sign out when leaving, very little distinction is made between the two organizations. On Thursday morning, I was working on the left side of the C&W shop on a NNR ex-British Rail Mark 1 passenger car (left side in the photo below).  Thursday afternoon and evening, I was working down the far end on the M&GN side of the Shop (right side in the photo below). 

 And here's a photo of me in the M&GN brake van.  You can see some of the rest of the M&GN historic equipment under restoration.  To give you an idea of how big the C&W shops are, the last car that you can see at the back in the photo below is directly opposite the passenger car on the left in the above photo.  The shops are a good 250' long. 

And here's the same photo again, but with a volunteer, Harry Hammond.  Harry's the one who has done all of the painting on this brake van.  Quite a job, eh!?

Notwithstanding that I got up to Weybourne at 12:30, I carried on with the teak drip edge for the M&GN brake van.   

While it might have seen as being a bit boring to be running the orbital sander up and down 4 pieces of wood, the smell of the teak sawdust was well worth it.  My objective was to get the saw blade marks out of the wood so that they wouldn’t show up when I applied the paint. 

After lunch (lunch occurs around 13:30!), I thinned some black primer with 10% paint thinner (it’s called “spirits” over here).  I applied the first coat of paint with the small paint roller I had picked up at the ironmongers (hardware store) in Sheringham.  Teak is like ash - it doesn't hold paint very well.  However, this trick of thinning the paint that I had picked up out at Smiths Falls several years ago worked extremely well with the primer soaking into the teak like an oil-based  stain.  Two more coats of thinned primer and we’ll be ready to apply the gloss coats of final black. 

Except for Harry and me, the lads all left at 4:30 leaving the two of us to lock up.  I left at 17:00 and, as it turned out, caught the last train back to Sheringham.  Otherwise, it would have been a 4 mile hike down the back country roads to Sheringham.  And I could have easily lost my way with all of those hedgerows blocking my vision. 

Dropped into “The Lobster” hoping to have lobster for supper but had to settle for the crab and brie melt with fresh potatoes, a garden salad and a pint.  The lobster fishermen hadn’t come back in yet and there was nothing left over from the day before. 

I made my way back to the B&B and tried to get onto the Internet but there was still a problem getting onto the Camberley House router.  Martin moved the router out into the guest living room and, hey presto - we were onto the Internet lickety split.  Two hours later and it's approaching midnight.  Time to go to bed.

Tomorrow will be an early day as I have to get all washed up after working.  I’ve been invited to the “visitors’ special” steam train run from Sheringham to Holt and back to Weybourne to inspect the sheds.  And it’s by invitation only so I must rate, eh!!??  Lotsa fun for sure!!.