It has been a very successful Work Week at Didcot Railway Centre.

The new concrete building now has a roof, Didcot Halt has newly-painted fences and our volunteers have drunk the Black Python Bar dry – in the evenings after they have finished their day’s work, of course.

There has been a real buzz around the centre and our visitors have shown great interest in all the work.

Of course we do our best to tell the story of the Great Western Railway and its history but sometimes, despite all our hard work, some of our visitors get as much, if not more, pleasure from some of the very simple things.

We find children seem to enjoy watching us dig holes and fill them with concrete as much as watching the trains, but of course that is OK.

It’s also great fun to find treasure and one of our young visitors today found some lovely fused glass that probably came from a bottle that had melted after being thrown into an engine’s firebox.

We found many other treasures while we were digging the foundations of the concrete building.

It’s a sign of changed times that we didn’t dig up any plastic but we did find some rubbish that workers in the old Didcot Depot must have thrown away that gives us a glimpse of earlier lives.

We weren’t surprised to find a broken mug printed with ‘Property of GWR. Return to Paddington’ and another piece with Great Western Railway crest but we didn’t expect to find one stamped ‘Southern Railway’.

Another piece was stamped ‘Booths Silicon China England’.

Booths Limited was a manufacturer of earthenwares at Tunstall, Staffordshire, between about 1891 and 1948. The firm used this mark after 1906 but our fragment doesn’t have a specific date.

'Silicon China’ was a name given to an improved, thin & lightweight earthenware body that was used in the catering markets - hotels, sea liners and railways.

As well as broken pottery, the haul included some complete glass bottles. One was marked C D O – County Dairies Oxford.

I wonder if this was the County Dairies that started in Kidlington in 1952 and closed in 2002. According to the Oxford Mail in 2001, at its height the diary supplied bottles of milk over an area from Leicester to Newbury, and London to Cheltenham.

Other bottles had come from further afield, including a 1930s bottle marked Yacht Exeter.

These are all part of our site’s history and I’m sure we will find a place to display them for everyone to enjoy.