Even today, locomotives want a small amount of dry sand for traction. All my resources are tacit about where they kept engine sand in Pembroke in 1905. There is also zero information about the purpose of the third stall in the roundhouse.
For years, I’ve thought there was probably a pile of sand somewhere and a small bunker inside the roundhouse where it would dry out, and probably be sifted for weeds. Then, while the roundhouse was off getting a new floor, and I was considering the location of the bunker, I noticed there is a large space between the second stall and the mysterious third stall. Putting zero and zero together, I reasoned that perhaps one of the uses of the third stall was to unload sand. I don’t imagine there would have been more than a few carloads of sand per year, but there was certainly room.
The roundhouse floor has now sprouted a lumpy styrofoam rectangle, with a wooden bunker around it. This provides a reason to very occasionally push a gondola into the roundhouse, and also resolves the mystery of engine sand.
Now that we have a walkable (if not finished) floor, it's really possible to appreciate the #roundhouse as a space. We've just enjoyed our first meal in this space.
And all the boards are now in the #roundhouse and stacked. I'd estimated that at a day's work, and the two of us did it between 4pm and 6pm this afternoon, so feeling pretty virtuous.
@adrianfry it's a reciprocal roof #roundhouse we're building on my land with timber from trees which were blown down in #StormArwen, for an old friend who is one of the #ExtinctionRebellion / #InsulateBritain heroes and so can't really afford to own anything. It's about 7 metres diameter over the pillars, about 11 over the eves.
The #roundhouse in snow for the first time ever. The outside temperature is now just above freezing, and what's falling now is no longer fluffy, but it's still just about snow. The southern and western horizons are very dark and threatening.
Storm is coming in, and my mental health, which has been unusually good all September, is imploding. This truly feels like the pathetic fallacy made real.
#roundhouse we've been making surprisingly fast progress with secondary joists. One consequence of this is that we've both got much better at cutting acute angled saw cuts!
Cutting floorboards for the #roundhouse, and I've just cut five square metres of (by our standards) really nice quality flooring from a single log. Small wins!
In the foreground, the foundation for the fireplace. In the background, the hearthstone which has to go on it. Moving the hearthstone to the foundation is going to be... Interesting.
We had a major setback on the #roundhouse on Saturday night, when wind got under the rubber sheet which didn't have enough turf on it, and blew a lot of the straw out. But we've recovered, and are making progress again.
That's the insulation up on the first half of the #roundhouse roof. The roof was first covered with an old cargo parachute, then the rubber membrane (170kgs – heavy!) was folded into a double scroll and passed up over the crown of the roof. Finally straw was passed up, and packed under the rubber as it was unfolded. About 250mm thickness of insulation at this stage, although it will pack down when the turf goes on.
@HeavenlyPossum A #roundhouse I'm helping a friend build. It's proving an incredibly cheap and really quite easy build; the rubber sheet has been the only four figure item, and it's probably going to end up even cheaper than my house (which came in at £7,000). In a locality where you can't buy a legal house for less than quarter of a million, that's... remarkable.