South Wall Cladding Beginning to Look Good

 Since the arrival of the final pieces of cladding the weather has been pretty awful with rain, extreme cold and high winds - not ideal.

Today though, Christmas Eve, has been bright, cold and calm enough to position the two lower panels either side of the kitchen outer door.  This is how it looked before:

The panels to be fitted are C2 and C3.  Why those panels first?  They and the lower panels alongside doors and windows have to fit the door and window frames precisely both vertically and horizontally.  The final positioning and spacing of the upper row of parapet panels can then match up precisely too.

Before the panels go on I go over the black Tyvek waterproof membrane seeing to any tears or fixing damage.  I mention this for your amusement and to reassure architect Stuart Green whose reputation hangs by quite a public thread here.  And I know he will come along and inspect!

Ignore the uneven gaps which will be sorted out in the final phase.

Christmas Comes Early and a Lovely Screenshot

Well Christmas this year is going to be different for everyone.  No family get-togethers, social distancing and lots of Zooming this year.  Hopefully Christmas 2021 will be back to normal?

Always one to adapt and to get things right our darling daughter Lorna brought Christmas to our doorstep this morning in the form of a bang-on-time delivery man bearing a wonderful and necessarily early gift for her lonely parents - Christmas Dinner in a huge and heavy box:

Impressively insulated and beautifully packed was absolutely everything - ready cooked!

We quickly stashed it all  away to the freezer drawer in the Fisher and Paykell BAAF*.  We shall report on or soon after Christmas Day but it is already clear that we shall eat well at New Year and possibly Easter too!

*BAAF, for new viewers, Big Arsed American Fridge.

For a while now, in my capacity as FoSCL's media contact, I have been doing what I can to help a DVD production company with a new DVD about the Settle-Carlisle Railway.  Yesterday the finished item arrived in the post so I settled down to view it on the BA75"TV (work it out for yourself) - all 1 hour 48 minutes of it.  It is superb and will be a great addition to the dozens of S&C DVDs which have already been done of course.   It reveals for the first time film of the line taken during the 1980s when closure threatened and besides showing that old film it explains matters S&C in a better way than I have ever seen before.  That's fine of course but imagine my surprise and delight when the southbound story got to the end and this appeared among the credits:

Chuffed to bits doesn't cover it!!

Final Panels Delivered

 They're here!   Delayed on several counts, not least having been stove enamel painted the wrong colour by sub-contractors.  To be fair, they have worked overnight to correct it and first thing this morning the first of two final deliveries arrived, in pouring rain.  The remainder later today.

We have in fact been lucky to get them done by the splendid Burnley Central Sheet Metals Ltd. 

Central Sheet Metals

They were able to squeeze them in between urgent COVID related orders.  The latest is for hundreds or thousands of cubicles for patients getting COVID vaccinations - starting yesterday!

 

The plan now is to hoist the final top row onto the flat roof directly behind their eventual parapet locations.   The lower panels will be stacked at ground level.

That way the panels can be fitted gradually and accurately as the day-by-day weather conditions allow.

Snow Lines

This stunning photograph appeared on Facebook today:

 

I thought it was far too good not to share it on Facebook and to Tweet it on Twitter which I duly did, entitling it 'Snow Lines'.  A bit of a play on words as the image showed two snow lines - the most obvious was the meteorological snowline - the line between the snow on the mountain and the green valley below.  The other snow line is of course the railway line snaking across the Ribblehead viaduct.

No sooner had I relayed the image my iPhone started to beep almost constantly as perhaps hundreds of people either liked or shared it.  I had done the proper thing and credited it to The Yorkshireman.  I still do not know the name of the photographer but would dearly like to know.

The picture has provoked a good deal of online comment and discussion.

As first glance it gives the impression of being an aerial photograph from an aircraft or a drone but hang on - the is snow in the close-up foreground.  The sun is to the right and we are high up on or near the top of Whernside looking almost south towards Pen y Ghent - the southernmost of the Three Peaks.  Ingleborough is out of shot to the right.  We are looking at the outer curve of the Ribblehead viaduct with scaffolding around the middle piers.  The Station Inn and Ribblehead station are just below centre.  To their right is the crater of the former Ribblehead quarry.

Three Nice Piccies - and a 'Well Known Person'?

 

 

I love this one showing a Virgin West Coast diverted train crossing Arten Gill viaduct.  Nowadays they prefer to bustitute people down the M6.  Madness.

And here are a couple of our magnificent neighbour Pen y Ghent in the recent snow

How lucky are we?

I might have arrived on God's Earth.  Network Rail have asked me as a 'well known person' to contribute a short bit of  internal video aimed at NR workers who will be working over Christmas.  They have to put up with a good deal of abuse when the railways are only able to run a limited service because of engineering works.  Here, filmed by expert cameraman Mike Farrington is my effort.  Michael Portillo has also been asked so I expect I shall end up on the cutting room floor but anyway - 

That may well not work, in which case you are lucky.

Well I didn't quite end up on the cutting room floor:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1342022633513242624

Gaskets and the Telegraph Front Page

 Our useful but old and small diesel tractor decided last winter it was not going to start.  I have just got round to tackling the problem which involved dismantling much of the engine, requiring a new cylinder head gasket.   Problem is that nobody stocks them anymore.  To the rescue though came Dobson's gaskets of Keighley who made on, which was delivered by hand yesterday:

Impressed eh?  I knew you would be.

We had snow yesterday and Thursday, to the newsworthy extent that this super picture of that viaduct  was the front page lead in the Daily Torygraph:

Working From Home with Zoom

 Our darling high powered lawyer daughter Lorna seems to spend much of her time in high powered international Zoom meetings.  Me too increasingly.  There the similarity ends though.  She is a real one for keeping up professional appearances but I just don't bother, appearance-wise.   Here she is in Zoom mode.

- in 'her' colours of green and blue.  

But all is not quite as it seems lower down:

Beautiful and sensible eh?

Talking of beautiful things, here are a couple of Yorkshire Dales pictures on Facebook this week:

There can't be many better views from a railway station platform than this of Dentdale from Dent station - now owned by The Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line too!

And below is Littondale: