We’re in print!
SWINDON PANEL PRESERVATION – The story of the preservation of Swindon Panel and its move to Didcot Railway Centre.
Official launch on Saturday at the Welcome to Didcot day, or pre-order your copy now at https://www.heritage-ops.org.uk/product/245/
All funds used in the preservation of Swindon Panel and our new task of bringing it back to life!
It is with great sadness that we report on the passing away of another member of Swindon Panel staff, Dave Cohen.
Dave previously worked in Gloucester S&T and moved to Swindon Panel S&T in 1976. He stayed at Swindon until the early 1990s, after which he went on to work for Racal (railway telephone providers) laying fibre-optic cables along side the track. During his time at Swindon he would have been heavily involved in the maintenance of the panel and the signalling equipment on the Swindon district.
Dave’s son Richard sometimes visited his father at work, and has many fond memories of being taken into Swindon Panel. He describes “Going upstairs to watch the lights moving along the panel and then peering out the window to watch the train pass through the station, or downstairs peering in wonder at the huge room of relays and circuitry or the rest room with the mixed smell of oil, tea and sandwiches.”
Unfortunately Dave passed away last week. Richard is trying to seek his father’s workmates who might still be either working or retired locally to advise them that Dave’s funeral will be held on 5 May at 12 noon at Swindon’s Kingsdown Crematorium, followed by a wake at Wootton Bassett Rugby Club at Ballards Ash.
If anyone wishes to contact Richard please let us know and we will put you through.
Our deepest sympathy is with Dave’s family at this very difficult time.
As we celebrate the arrival of Swindon Panel in Didcot, we also remember the contributions made to the life of the panel by the signalmen and women who operated and maintained it. One such person is Colin Baldwin, who unfortunately passed away recently.
Those who knew him may be interested to know the following:
Colin Anthony Baldwin died peacefully at home on 24th March 2016 aged 80 years. The much loved husband of Sybil, dad to Kay, Mark & Ian, a loving father in law and grampy. Colin was a retired railway signalman, horse racing and football enthusiast, who will be sadly missed by all who knew him. Funeral service to be held at St Margaret’s Parish Church, Stratton St Margaret, Swindon on Tuesday 12th April 2016 at 2:30pm. Please wear bright colours. Family flowers only however donations in Colin’s memory for the Prospect Hospice may be sent c/o G & L Evans Family Funeral Services, 4 Covingham Square, Swindon, Wiltshire. SN3 5AA Tel: 01793 526999
The panel has now been moved into its new building and its new permanent home.
The roof of the building was finished earlier this week – just in time!
The panel was lifted in by the Great Western Society’s steam crane.
Thank you very much to everyone who has helped over the last week, the last month at Swindon and the last several years of the project – we’re home and dry… ish! The building doesn’t have any doors or windows yet so there is still a little way to go!
We will be at Didcot tomorrow (Friday 8 April), Saturday (9th) and Sunday (10th) – come and join in if you want to be part of the action!
We also hope to see you on Saturday 30th April for our ‘Welcome to Didcot’!
The Panel Preservation Movement is Born!
This morning there were no large-scale preserved panels. This evening there is one.
Thanks to an excellent turnout of SPS and GWS volunteers and P&D Specialist Services at Swindon Panel today, the culmination of two years’ careful planning and preparation since the project was first formed over three years ago, the panel was successfully extracted from the building at last!
The team assembled at Swindon Panel at 6am to start the roll-out of the panel. The panel had been raised up to the appropriate height and position on previous weekends, and the runway out onto the roof had been prepared on Friday.
Lots of checks took place on the frame and panel to ensure it was ready for departure. The wooden boarding that had temporarily replaced the end window and door was removed and steel channel rails laid out of the control room onto the roof. In small steps the panel was pushed out onto the roof by SPS volunteers.
By 8am the panel was positioned outside on the roof, and was ready for collection.
Meanwhile an enormous lorry and hi-ab had arrived outside the building (much to the concern of the driver, given the access available!).
Shortly after 8am, right on time, the lifting harnesses were applied to the frame and, after more checks, the hi-ab took the strain and whole panel was inched off the roof. Once confident, the panel was lifted over the barriers that were around the edge of the roof and down onto the trailer. It was a momentous occasion for all those present and everyone in the Society following on Facebook, Twitter, etc, that the day we had waited so long for had finally arrived!
The panel lorry departed at about 9am, on schedule, for Didcot, followed by an entourage of SPS members’ vehicles taking photographs! It arrived at Didcot shortly after 10am.
The panel was then loaded into a waiting wagon in the DB Fuel Point yard by P&D for onward transit by rail. Some other items, such as blocks and steelwork was also loaded into the same wagon.
66176 arrived at about 11.40 to collect the very short train and at 12 noon it moved from the West Yard to the Main Yard, and then about 15 minutes later shunted forward at Didcot East to set-back into the Railway Centre.
The panel then spent a lovely afternoon in the sunshine that it would have seen so little of in its life before, sitting alongside the Demonstration Line platform. Later that afternoon it was shunted into the locomotive shed for under-cover storage until later this week.
Meanwhile, at Swindon, the team worked hard to restore the building to better-than-original condition. All manner of debris of the closure, decommissioning and our removal of the panel was removed, picked up, hoovered, replaced, squared up and secured: The window steel frames, uPVC fittings and glass panels were all replaced, door frame welded back into position, the handrails on the roof replaced, the floor in the control room made safe and holes covered with wood. The control room really is cleaner a lot than we found it!
At Didcot, work continued in the afternoon in preparing the building for the acceptance of the panel on Thursday. The many tools and items of equipment that we had used over the last several weekends were also brought back into the Railway Centre and returned to their correct places.
It was a fantastic day at Swindon and Didcot. We hope you enjoyed being part of it, whether that’s because you were there or because you followed progress through the day on Facebook or Twitter.
If you took photos today, please do send them in. The photos are extremely useful for ‘selling’ the Society to prospective supporters.
A huge thank you to everyone who has helped the Panel Society reach this stage – what a fantastic achievement for all of us! WELL DONE!
Not finished yet!
However…….. we must remember that the job hasn’t finished yet!
Not least because we need to now get the panel into its new building and settled in.
The interior of the new building is a long way off completion, and then requires to be fitted with an education and interesting set of displays and equipment.
The panel also needs wiring up (which will be a huge task) so that it can work as realistically as the real thing.
Come and join us at Didcot in completing the preservation of Swindon Panel – it will be great fun!
We will be at Didcot tomorrow (Sunday 3 April) and then from Thursday (7 April) to Sunday (10 April) inclusive, during which time we will install the panel in the new building.
Photo and Video Competition
We will be very pleased to receive photographs of the panel on its journey today – being lifted off the panel roof, being transported by road, being lifted onto the train, then being moved by train into the Railway Centre (including through Didcot Parkway station!)
Welcome To Didcot – Saturday 30 April
Let us welcome you, and give you the opportunity to welcome the panel, to Didcot!
This will be the first time the covers are taken off the panel, and everyone can take part in starting to re-insert the Domino tiles!
The time of the Great Lift of Swindon Panel has nearly arrived.
You can read about the times planned for Saturday in this recent news update.
Don’t forget our Photo/Video Competition of the panel move.
You will hopefully be able to hear us on BBC Wiltshire at about 7.30am on Saturday too.
If you are planning to join us at any point over the weekend, please make sure you’ve read the notes in the email that was distributed on Thursday evening. If you have any problems please let us know.
Thank you to everyone for all the tremendous help over the last several weekends. It’s been great fun, and now we’re getting our panel at last!
Danny S.
It is with great sadness that we have to report the passing away of former Swindon Panel signalman Colin Baldwin.
Many members and supporters of this group will have known or worked with Colin up until his retirement from Swindon Panel in 1995. Colin enjoyed a joint leaving do with his friend and colleague Glyn Thomas who retired at the same time.
Colin and his wife Sybil were kind enough to invite SPS to visit them at their house about six months ago to talk about the panel and Colin’s memories of it after they saw us on Points West. They were also kind enough to allow us to scan their collection of photos, now available in our photo gallery.
Our deepest sympathy is with Colin’s family at this very difficult time.
An absolutely astonishing effort by the thirteen SPS members in attendance today at Swindon PSB has seen the panel drawn up to the signal (the door) ready to depart the sidings and embark on its journey to its new home and its new life.
The panel has been raised a further 12 inches from last weekend, up to its required height to leave the building, and a blockwork runway has been built underneath the frame. The jacking bolts that have worked so hard over the last few weeks raising the panel up have been retracted allowing the frame roller wheels to be lowered down into steel channel on top of the blocks. This concludes the preparations in the control room for Swindon Panel’s extraction from the building!
As a test the panel was moved about 4 feet along its runway towards the Bristol-end doors of the building and it was found that the panel does move with relative ease.
Before:
After:
THANK YOU, on behalf of everyone involved with and supporting Swindon Panel, and from me personally, to everyone who has contributed in all and any ways to the progress of our project thus far; getting to this stage is an immense achievement! It has not been without its hurdles, but a significant number of people helping in exactly the right way at exactly the right time has got us over those hurdles. The breadth of skills in our supporter-base is immense and everyone’s willingness to contribute has been very impressive indeed.
So the panel is ready to leave the control room, but there is still a lot of work to do to get it to Didcot.
Commencing at 0600 on Saturday 2 April the panel will start to be rolled-out onto the roof. Help is needed with this! As the rear of the panel clears the runway at the back, so the blocks are require to be moved around to the front to support the further forward movement. The panel is 30 feet long and requires to move about 40 feet and there is about 15 feet of runway blocks in hand.
The road lorry will arrive at about 0700 and lift at about 0800. If all goes to plan the road journey will commence at about 0930. (Don’t forget our Photo Competition regarding its journey!)
Then, from 1000 our main working days starts in the making-good of the building: The doors and windows have to be replaced and all our waste and debris tidied away to leave the building in a good condition for hand-back to Network Rail.
So there is plenty to do, and if you can help on Saturday 2 April then please get in touch – many hands make light work and we can promise you’ll feel very rewarded at the end of the day when you see how much progress can be made!
The panel will be taken to Didcot’s West Yard (Deutsche Bahn locomotive fuelling point) for transshipment to a railway wagon, on which it will move into the Railway Centre, via Didcot Parkway station. It is expected that the panel will move into its new building in Didcot at the end of the week, possibly the Thursday or Friday.
Great work everyone – keep it up!
Re-enacting a famous scene!
Or something similar?
If so, and it is capable of carrying some weight, would you consider conveying some items from Swindon to Didcot for us please?
There are two main groups of things to be conveyed, one is a lot of Thermalite blocks that we are using for the runway for the panel to leave the building, and the other is the metal door plates from the panel (about 5′ x 2′ each).
The panel doors could also fit in a large car.
It will save some considerable work if these can be moved to Didcot on Saturday 2 April and loaded onto the same train as the panel, to remove the need to carry them through the station subway (as was the original plan).
As always, please let us know if you can help. Many thanks.
We really have found ourselves understaffed at Didcot recently, unfortunately.
We also have several jobs at Didcot that need our attention –
– Undercoat-painting of wooden doors for new panel building
– Continuing work on the rail wagons to be used for bringing the panel into the Centre. Mainly scraping and painting.
– Plus an opportunity to man a sales stand for Swindon Panel during the Tornado Easter Gala at Didcot Railway Centre over the bank holiday weekend. If you would like to help out, but the work at Swindon isn’t your thing, here is a great way to raise some awareness and sales for the Society! The sales items are things such as our mugs, coasters, badges and magnets. Please let us know if you can help.
Please let us know if you can help with any of these and we will make arrangements at DRC.
Many thanks!