Thursday & Friday And Winding Down

As I enter the final days of trip to England, I've been cleaning up a few loose ends on the search for my family roots and saying goodbyes to the friends I've met on the North Norfolk Railway.

Thursday was spent needle-gunning some of the rust and crud out of the Mark 1 passenger coach that is undergoing major body repairs in the Carriage & Wagon Shops.  The Holt-half of the coach has been stripped down to the steel underframe and back to the bare steel walls.  The rusted steel was cut out of the toilet-end of the car and new steel was cut, fitted, and welded into place.  Quite a job as there are compound curves on these cars so it's more than just tacking a sheet of flat steel to the steel studs.  Steve had done quite a good welding job over the last weeks while I was here - a sculptor in steel.  Next the lads went to town and stripped out the interior, starting to replace the window frames with "new" ones that were salvaged from a previously scrapped car.  So, there I was on Thursday helping out with the finals of scraping the rust and crud from the steel frame and the side walls.  To say it was a dirty job would be an understatement.  I didn't recognize who I was when I stared into the mirror before taking my shower at the shops.

I was going to leave early but André asked me if I was going to stay for "fish and chips".  Actually that's code for "Nigel of Scarlett will shortly be showing up and a few of the guys are going to hang around and do some restoration work on some of the old rolling stock.  Would you like to stay?"  After a couple of seconds of hesitation, I said "sure, why not", just as Nigel drove into the yard.  The first order of the evening was to order the fish and chips and put the kettle on for some tea.

While Nigel went for the fish and chips, I bummed around the sheds looking at the locomotives under various stages of overhaul and repair.  They are quite the shops they have at the North Norfolk.  Everything you would need in the way of machinery - except they now need some heavy-duty jacks to lift a 50-ton steam locomotive so that they can replace the busted axle boxes.  I'm sure they'll find something as these lads are extremely resourceful. 

After devouring the fish and chips it was time to get down to some work.  Nigel had "borrowed" the magnet drill press to drill some horizontal holes through some 1" steel plate on the 1884 Wisbech & Upwell Composite Tramcar No. 7.  Sister car #8 went on to become a movie star in the early 1950s British movie "Titfield Thunderbolt".

Now, in case you don't know what a magnet drill press is, the base of the machine is an electo-magnet.  Flick the switch and the drill press sticks to steel in whatever position you want it to be in - vertical, horizontal, upside-down, right-side-up - you decide.  Except that it weighs about 40 lbs and is very awkward to place, especially when you want to drill some horizontal holes - which is what we wanted to do.  And we were drilling first through a wood buffer beam and then through the steel - in which case electro-magnets aren't known for their magnetism on wood.

That problem was easily solved by clamping a big steel bar to the wooden buffer beam.  It was then back-and-forth to the engineering shop to find the right size of drill, then to have André sharpen it, then to find a longer drill as we had run out of travel on the drill press.  Next it was to find a "smaller" drill to drill a pilot hole.  At last we were all set to go.  After the first hole, things went smoothly and, in between a tea break at 8:30, we soon had all four holes drilled.  Except that there are 8 more holes to be drilled at the other end of the coach.  Maybe tomorrow.  We'll see.

Friday (today) I wanted to clear up a few things on my research into the Moore family tree.  I hadn't been able to find any records on the baptism of my great-great-grandparents, Stephen Moore and Sarah Page back in 1857 and 1860 respectively.  It was by chance that these two dates straddled two register books.  After going through the Letheringsett Parish Records microfilm and the Archdeacon's Register microfiche and not having any luck, I was able to order the original Parish Records from the archives.  Normally, the original registers are not available to the public.  As the dates I was researching fell between gaps in the registers, I was able to take a look at the originals. 

It's one thing to look at parish records on microfilm.  But it is really something else to look at the original registers.  The pages of these books are vellum - calf skin that has been scraped thin, treated, dried, and cut into pages.  It is a very durable material that will last for centuries.  The ink on the pages had dried to a very, very dark reddish brown and the vellum had darkened a bit.  In spite of this, each entry was very legible and easy to read.  In my opinion, the registers need to be recopied using modern scanning techniques to do justice to these works of art.  

While I was able to browse through the pages of these works of art, I wasn't able to find any record of their baptisms.  Marriages - yes.  Baptisms of their children - yes.  The death of Stephen Moore - yes.  The death of Sarah Page -yes.  But no baptisms.

The entry for the death of Stephen Moore was something else to behold!  The microfilming process for this record had "translated" the brownish pigment of the vellum into illegible blotches.  The actual register was extremely clear and legible.  It was utterly fantastic to be viewing this record of my great-great-great grandfather. 

So, not having any luck, I made my way back to the Norwich train station and caught the 4:45 train back to Sheringham.  We're back at the Weybourne shops for one last trip tomorrow and back down to Letheringsett on Sunday before we move down to Oxted for Monday.  Monday evening, I'm having dinner at 1 Welcome Cottage in Woldingham - the place where my mother lived as a little girl until just before she (and I) moved to Canada.