West of the Fields (Part Two)

I was absent over the weekend because I went on another short break to the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway to mess around at doing some work and to drink quite a bit. But this time I had a digital camera with me and so can share the full experience with you all this time.

*watches audience quake in boots*

Um so…was picked up at work on Friday afternoon and we drove over to Wales. There is no way I could ever take my own car on one of these trips – it is such a macho pissing contest of who has the best car and who can drive it round corners very very fast indeed…or sometimes, it’s not a car, sometimes it’s a supertruck.

This is a Pinzgauer, a military truck, and one of these always gets brought by a guy who works for them and is using the long-distance trips to road-test the vehicles. They’re pretty cool, anyway, and we raced this one pretty much all the way from Shrewsbury to Knockin (home of the Knockin Shop, groan). On the way over we all stopped for a pint and a discussion of how people were tempted to take up smoking just so that they could smoke in a pub before it got banned. We then proceeded over the higher roads to Bala and on to Blaenau, which meant we were driving through countryside covered in snow…but sadly I was having to concentrate too hard on not being travelsick in the back as we went into hairpins at 50mph to take any photos. We lost the truck behind us at this point as, as we later found out, they’d found themselves going round a corner sideways and decided to drop the speed just a tad.

This is Minfford hostel, as seen from the yard below it – the hostel is owned by the railway, which means cheap accommodation if you’re a volunteer but does also mean that the tv room is likely to be inhabited by miniature 12-yr-old trainspotters with greasy hair, a Book of Railways and a clipboard. Seriously. We ran away in fear.

So on Friday night we got a taxi into Porthmadog and went for curry. Generally a good night, with enough drinking to lead to consideration of possible porn careers for some members of the party.

At about midnight, 4 of us decided to head back and, as is traditional on these weekends, decided to walk back instead of get a taxi. The walk back takes about 50 minutes, half of which is spent crossing the Cob, one of those roadway-across-the-mouth-of-a-bay things. On Friday night this was incredibly exposed as the cold wind blew down off the snowy mountains to the east. Do not let the guy in the middle fool you – he is just showing off. It is frelling freezing at this point.

I think other people carried on drinking after we got back but I dropped into my little bunk bed utterly exhausted and slept like a Trojan log. (Mixed metaphor? I’m sure logs slept as well in Troy as in anywhere else.)

On Saturday I was working in the yard, with this bunch of freaks.

All we were basically doing was taking up old rail and laying new, right next to the bit we did last time, except this time we had far fewer people and we were only working on it for a day, so basically we only got the old rail and sleepers out the way, and about half of the new ones laid properly. Was good straightforward work, though. This is a photo from lunchtime I think…shows all the new sleepers waiting to go in (the random bricks were our best attempt to mark where they’d need to go so that we could dig holes for them).

This, said the bearded and slightly odd man (well, what did I expect) who was working with us, is an S-chair. That means it is Heritage. So it goes on a different pile.

Taken from the yard while we were working – an actual train on the actual line. Pretty choo choo. Another girl got to go for a footplate ride on that one in the afternoon. But she didn’t get to operate a valve like I did, so I controlled my rampant jealousy (I may possibly have been getting a little fed up with shovelling ballast by this point).

Saturday evening degenerated into utter drunken silliness, womble porn and fruit-based thumb wars as seen below. In the foreground can be seen many shot glasses lovingly crafted from apples, too. Also pizza with beer spilled on it.

Sunday was absolutely gorgeous weather – this is the view across the Cob to Porthmadog in daylight when you can actually see it.

This day I was working down at the railway works – this is a photo taken standing on the Cob, looking back towards the works

- helping to put up an overhead crane (which was lifted into place somewhat precariously by a jcb that really didn’t fit inside the shed). Photo below illustrates why you shouldn’t use flash photography around hi-vis.

So anyway, jobs included drilling holes in the concrete and bolting the stanchions into them, climbing up ladders to tighten nuts & bolts in fishplates, oh and of course grinding. Bad photo but ee – sparks. Which don’t seem to some out too well in photos – there were a lot more of them in real life. Also, isn’t my long-tailed hi-vi dinner jacket thing just the best fashion accessory ever?

Other random photos taken include the gunpowder truck (this was originally a railway line which served a slate mine)

the makeshift picnic table for lunch (and look…those are cups of tea…and one of them’s mine…)

and, to finish, the absolutely gorgeous view to the east of snow-capped Snowdon, head still lost in the clouds.

And then we came home. The end.