Saturday 31st January

The gang arrived at the Four Marks alps to find that a layer of snow had fallen in the night (not forecast I might add!- Ed), which had the potential to disrupt the planned activities for the day. The first problem was extracting the Wickham Trolley out of the sidings, which involved scraping the rails and point mechanisms, and an element of 'man-draulic' power, to get it onto the running line.

With this achieved, John, Keith H, Ian J, and Ian R set off down the line to Soak cutting to start on the replacement of the below rail pads in the section of RNB6 and 7 fastened flat bottom track. Martin B and Adrian meanwhile cleaned off the company transport, and headed off to Ampfield, nr Romsey, where they collected a pack of bricks for use in the construction of the chimney to the next planned new Pway hut at the western end of Ropley Soak cutting. The journey was uneventful, fortunately with no sign of snow from Alresford onwards.

On their return to M&FM the gang (which now included Eddie) were called upon to provide transport, initially to go to Alton for the obligatory breakfast rolls, before heading back to M&FM to load the bricks for shipment down the line to the Ropley Soak hut site. Then it was back up into Soak cutting to resume the rail pad replacement work. By the end of the day just over a length of track had been attended to, which was quite good given the laborious nature of the process.

A snowy M&FM yard

Below rail pads are replaced