After last night’s thunderstorm, the trackbed and station were very
wet on Monday morning- but two intrepid volunteers braved the mud in the
afternoon, and – after three hours’ work, have pretty well completed
the turning area. This is a legal right-of-way over Trust land to the
fields, and will see some heavy traffic once the fence boundary is
complete – so it has to be hardened to cope.
James, feeling guilty at having wasted the fine weather on Sunday by
skiving off to the Mid-Norfolk Railway, made a start on tidying the
various piles of material, to make the site look a bit less tatty. Then
Toby and James took turns loading and dumping the rubble, and created a
large all-weather apron which will soon green up as spring finally
springs. Then they had a long discussion about methods and amounts of
material (costs) to complete the access road and the other right-of-way
area in the light of experience over the last few days.
None of this activity was in any way photogenic, so we have added a totally gratuitous photo of a steam-hauled heritage train at our friends the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway. It may be worth mentioning that this railway is the nearest in style to the SR, among all the 201 in the UK – it is narrow gauge, quirky, greatly-regretted, closed for almost as long, and now being rebuilt on its original trackbed.
It is also in a very sensitive landscape area – in fact squarely within the Exmoor National Park (which we think trumps the Suffolk AONB). Perhaps surprisingly in the context of the SRT’s troubles, very few local Devon people, or organisations, are moaning about the L&B!