GWSR Lineside

 Four of us today at Bishops Cleeve, with no inclement weather this week. After some tidying up at the Pecked Lane foot crossing and along the Smarties Nursery, we moved to today's site at Station Road, where we have cleared around the bridge a bit more and cleared the entire bank alongside our neighbours property and cut down some sprouting trees alongside the track further up. Looking at the mobile home site it is hard to believe that this was so completely cleared not that long ago.

 Non running day and P-Way had control of the line with no trains running so Paul Batey and I braved the back end of Storm Boelo to head to Cheltenham. There were three tasks, a couple of old tree trumps which the Friends of Cheltenham had de-limbed but needed taken out, an oak tree on the bank by the entrance which was in the wrong place and a TPO fir tree which was dead and high on the bank on the other platform. The first two tasks were straight forward with me on chainsaw and Paul chipping the remaining branches.  We left a few of the smaller logs on the bank for local home fires. The last task took some effort with the gate on the Malvern side of the bridge needing to be leaverd open. to get the chipper and truck close to the tree.  The tree was cleared (thanks to the CRC team for removing the platform lamp as requested) with no damage and nothing on the tracks.  Paul cleared the general brash and the remaining fir logs were stacked. A bit of clean-up needed for...

 Early call to cancel due to Storm Austin hitting Friday and Storm Boelo hitting Saturday

 No work today due to heavy rain.

We had a team of 11 out today: Alex, Andy, Sally, Paul, Chris, Ian, Lawrence, Dave Brown and Brummie Dave.  The team also welcomed Sue and Rhianon as new members.  We continued along the Cotswold side of the embankment at Mrs Ts clearing out some bigger trees. They made great progress and cleared about 30 metres of the bank.  Here the embankment is getting slightly shallower but it is still covered in dense growth so the method of clearance is to take out the lower part thus allowing the growth on the slope to be felled  without getting hung up on the surrounding trees. Ian cleared all the growth around the large p ear tree enabling it to be inspected for the best method of dealing with it.  It was decided that the tree should remain but it would benefit from having the one limb to be removed thus taking a lot of the weight out it.  Dave Brown  and Lawrence set about clearing the smaller growth and the dross was burnt on one of the two fires which we h...

  Five of us today on the Broadway Car Park Bank and excellent progresss made. We have now got past the Oak tree, having finished the area with ground mesh, and are now into the fairly densly wooded area.  As Brian commented "This is more like old school lineside clearance" As a reward? for doing so well, next week, for one week only, we will have a break from Broadway and complete the clearance at Station Road Bridge in Bishops Cleeve, which was started in the summer but not completed due to bird nesting. Well done everyone. Nick Wright.

 A  fantastic week this week, with Steve, Dave, Alex, Chris and I at work on the embankment. Alex and Chris were on raking and burning duty, Steve was on chainsaw duty, Dave as always the excellent look out and I was on brushcutting duty. Over 20 metres was cleared and burned, plus a new vehicle parking spot cut ready for next week. Plenty of red kites around, but more interesting were European hornets (amongst mean wasps, bees and flies) feeding on rotting perry pears. An interesting find was some fossilized shell. Great to see the railway so busy for the mixed traffic gala. Graham 

  Only three of us today at the Broadway Car Park bank, but all were brushcutter operators so plenty of potential, however we were held off working due to the very heavy rain until morning break. Good progress was then made and we are close to the end of the ground mesh section, where the bramble has now got very thick and very high, so a combination of brushcutter and hedge trimmer was required. Talking of the hedge trimmer, we got the remaining one big running so no worries there, but the trigger of the 211 chainsaw exploded, so I have passed it to Stuart in C & W for him to fiddle with. When I picked up the truck this morning it was full of logs which was not very helpful.  I have unloaded them to the side of the last container opposite S & T. (Apologies, my bad - timed out yesterday LH) Nick Wright

 Great progress by the Wednesday team on the car park bank at Broadway.

No updated photos but there were a team of 6 (Brummie Dave, Alex, Chris, Ian, Steve B and Trina) continuing to work on Mrs Ts bank. This was a successful day where the team of 6 made considerable progress along this difficult area of embankment It was heavily overgrown with a dense growth of mainly  blackthorn bushes.  This made progress slower but relentless.  There is a quantity of cut debris left to burn next time on this section and it will require brush cutters or hedge trimmers to cut the large amount of blackberry bushes that  are prevalent on the bank before entering a section  of shrubbery which can be done using chainsaws . A good fire enabled a lot of the debris to be disposed of. Well done everyone BRUMMIE DAVE The work plan is to work the bank in sections In the following sectioning of the banks:-  10 8 6 4 2 9 7 5 3 1 Last week the team removed section 1. This clears the way for section 2 for be done next week (with nothing in the way of getting t...