Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen Fire Steam Locos in the Midday Sun

Anybody who lives in the UK at the moment can't fail to have noticed that it has been hot lately.  Not just the sort of hot that means brass monkeys have something rather different to worry about, but the sort of hot that could melt a loco's fire bars without the fire even needing to have been  lit.  It was just shaping out to be that sort of a fire bar melting day on Saturday when I arrived at Toddington for a cleaning turn.   I was booked on to clean the 8F.  Cliff was down for a driver training turn with Steve as his instructor.  No fireman had appeared on the roster, but I assumed that there would have been a flurry of emails over the preceding days and that one would have been found and that I just didn't know about it.  As we all know, assumption is the mother of all cock-ups.  I discovered from Cliff when he turned up that no fireman had been found to be available and that consequently he would be forgoing his driver training turn and I was now supposed to fire the 8F under his tutelage for the day.  Nothing like being pitched in at the deep end.  The stack of wood that I had fetched from the wood store for the mystery fireman to use to light the 8F up I now had to put to use myself.  Whilst I got on with that, another new starter appeared for his first day with us.  Paul used to be a cleaner on the East Lancs Railway, but couldn't keep up with the considerable commute and has now joined us.  Needless to say as I was now tied up with lighting up the 8F, I was extremely glad to have him around to clean it.

Paul smartening up the smoke box of the 8F

Cliff proceeds to oil up the 8F while Paul watches

All we need now is the bacon & eggs.... and sausages and....

A bit of shunting was required before we could set off

We had to queue a bit in order to be able to get onto the ash pit to clear out the ash pan.  In fact we had to hang around until 10:00 before 5542 set off down to Cheltenham, thereby allowing the DMU to set off for its platform which would then clear the way for us to get onto the ash pit.

At the back of the queue, watching 5542 set off

Firing on a hot dry day means you have a couple more things to think about.  Firstly you need to have a fair supply of bottled water to hand on the footplate and secondly you need to keep the coal damp to suppress dust. On the plus side, you don't have to worry yourself too much about connecting up the steam heat pipes. Suppressing coal dust is particularly important when running tender first as the dust will just get blown straight back into your face if you don't keep it damp.  

Giving the coal a good hosing down before we set off

Just damping the coal down at the start of the day isn't enough of course and I found myself repeating the process on each arrival at Toddington prior to the tender first run down to Cheltenham.  Steve informed me on one of those occasions that the over spray managed to hit the train's guard who was walking past on the platform at the time.  The guard concerned was Claudette, Steve's wife.  Sorry Claudette.

As this was now an official fireman training turn, I was too busy most of the time to grab any photos of what went on, which considering how I did was probably just as well.  On one of the runs, we got held up at the outer home signal for Winchcombe:

Steve waits for the signal, somehow Cliff manages to wear a jacket and remain cool

Steve tried to catch me out by asking how long we should wait at the signal before the fireman was supposed to ring the signal box.  I didn't tell him that Sean had asked me exactly the same question at the same signal a month or so ago, which was how I knew that the answer was two minutes. 

As it turns out, trying to manage the boiler whilst doing all the other things that you're supposed to be doing (observing signals/exchanging tokens/watching crossings/coupling/uncoupling/watching out of tunnels/in/out of platforms etc) is something of a juggling act.  I definitely made a hash of it for the first round trip and the third wasn't much better.  The first few times you fire a steam loco, you work on the principle that too much steam is better than too little and you just sling coal in regardless and end up with the loco blowing off in all sorts of places.  After a few times of doing that, you try to acquire some finesse and be more selective about how much and when you fire.  This time round I probably went too far in that respect and ran the fire and consequently water levels down a bit further than would have been desirable.  Something to work on there.  On the plus side, there was no blowing off whilst I was on the footplate, though she did blow off on the first and third trip whilst I was coupling the loco to the stock.  Having said that, I had a bit of an excuse on the third trip out as I couldn't get back onto the footplate after coupling up.  A bride and groom who were using the railway to host their wedding reception had taken up residence on the footplate for their wedding photos and I didn't feel that I could just barge past to stick an injector on.

The happy couple

In modern parlance, Steve 'photobombs' the wedding photos

Mercifully the bride wasn't wearing white, the footplate of a steam loco is no place for a white wedding dress.  Their story was reported on in the Gloucestershire Echo.  If you want to plan a steamy wedding with plenty of coupling, you now know where to go. 

Another thing that I learned during the course of the day was that short sleeve shirts and firing don't mix too well.  Allowing a bare forearm to contact the fire hole rim whilst aiming a shovel full of coal into one of the back corners is something that you don't do twice. In fact if you've got any sense at all, you don't do it once.  Hot days on our Merchant Navy, 35006 P&O SN Co will be fairly testing when she enters traffic. Her grate is just as long yet double the width of any of our other tender engines. Keeping the back corners fed with coal without burning yourself on a day like this one had been will be a bit of a challenge.  There are a number of trainee drivers who are keen to pass out before then so that they won't have to try.  Personally I'd rather take my chances with the shovel than have to clean her.... it took me forever when I cleaned her ready for display at the gala.

As someone who works in the world of IT, I'm used to taking professional certification exams on a regular basis, computer based multiple guesswork kind of affairs, each question having four possible answers, just select the correct one in each case.  The GWSR being a heritage railway is stuck in a 1950's time warp and so I shouldn't really complain that the exams are paper based.  So it was with the 'shunting & yard safety' exam.  It doesn't actually qualify you to take part in shunting operations and I'm not going to tempt providence by saying that it makes you safe.  What it does do however is force you to re-acquaint yourself with a biro and make you try to scrawl legible answers on a few pieces of paper. I had been hoping for a quill and parchment, but apparently they had been phased out in the 1955 modernisation plan.  Being a safety related exam, the pass mark is 90%, so no pressure there then.  It also on at least one question expects you to draw a diagram.  Art was never my strong suit at school.  Anyway, I am pleased to be able to report that I got through with just one mark docked.  I won't be giving too much away by saying that there is a question on buckeye couplings and I either wrote that I'd shorten the buffers when I should have been lengthening them, or the other way round, I can't remember which now.  Either way in the real world, I'll probably only get to do any buckeye uncoupling in anger in the hopefully unlikely event that we have a carriage on fire in the train and I find myself trying to separate the burning carriage from the others.  Under those circumstances, I doubt that I'll be caring too much about what position I leave the buffers in, or the French pins either come to that (something to do with Gallic hand grenades I understand).

And finally, the long walk to Broadway will be kicking off in just over a week's time.  Before then I am hoping to be able to bring you good news about being able to sponsor the extension to Broadway online.  Watch this space.