Saturday 21st June

Those arriving at M&FM bright and early expecting to embark on the usual line inspections were to be disappointed, with two pressing maintenance tasks taking precedence. The first of these was to replenish the ballast beds on a section of track about a quarter of a mile to the west of the Station near Lymington Bottom bridge. The Harsco Stoneblower machine had been fettling the top line and alignment of the track during an evening's work session, resulting in a depletion of the ballast, so with the help of Pat B driving the KGT rail-road machine, bags of new ballast were transported to site and the contents duly distributed.

Following this, the second task of the morning involved making some minor corrections to the alignment of the track at Alresford Station, with Keith B, Tom, John, and Martin B skillfully using a pair of rail jacks to achieve the desired result. Adrian, Keith H, and Ian R meanwhile made their way to the A31 embankment, where in the brief period before the trek to Alresford for refreshments, Keith continued with bank clearance work, and Adrian and Ian began to put the finishing touches to the hut chimney, by starting to place mortar fillets on the top of the corbelled brick courses to the sides of the chimney breast.

They were joined by the others and Neil in the afternoon, which saw three chainsaws in action, and the burning of a large amount of cut material. Neil finished off the chimney work, and added a piece of decoration to the stack in the form of a small gargoyle, which some say is to ward off 'western' evil spirits.

The gargoyle watches over the hut