Dinmore Manor's First Moves on the GWSR

No sooner had I uploaded last week's blog, than I discovered an email from Frederick Lea containing a photo taken of Tina on the footplate of 5542 at Winchcombe.  Being skilled at artistic composition, he has carefully chosen a moment when I wasn't visible on the footplate.  Frederick has painted a number of excellent water colour images of scenes from the line, more details of which can be found on his website. 

Tina in 5542, Photo courtesy of Frederick Lea

 Last week saw the railway running race specials on most days to the Cheltenham Gold Cup.  The timetable is a fairly relaxed one, taking the race goers from Toddington to Cheltenham in the morning, returning to Toddington with empty coaching stock, then waiting there until the races are over and it's time to go back to Cheltenham and fetch them back again.  The quandry as to what to do with all the free time between trips was solved by Derek and Howard who both managed to fall asleep.  Somehow Derek dozed off sat upright.  Reports that their snoring could be heard as far away as Cheltenham have been refuted.

Asleep on the job. Photo courtesy of Tim Pickthorn.

Firemen need to arrive on the railway with some means of igniting their fires.  A box of matches or a cigarette lighter being the preferred options, though rubbing two boy scouts sticks together or focusing the suns rays using a magnifying glass are useful standbys.  Once the fire has taken hold, it's usually considered a good idea to put your means of commencing combustion away in a safe place. The warming tray whilst being conveniently located, is not a safe place as Phil discovered:

Spontaneous combustion.  Photo courtesy of Andy Beale.

By Saturday, the races were all done and dusted, large sums of money had doubtless changed hands and I suspect that more than a few sore heads were bearing testimony to the consumption of prodigious quantities of alcohol.

Saturday being a blue timetable day meant that only one steam loco was running, the 8F was in an advanced state of being prepared for service by the time I arrived.  I'd not quite finished cleaning the smoke box when Cliff needed to move her a bit to give access to some of those hard to get at oiling points.  As usual, the use of the ejector to create a vacuum and release the brakes caused plenty of water to be sprayed out of the chimney and onto the nicely cleaned smoke box much to the amusement of all present.

It was clean a moment ago, honest!

She was soon off shed and round to the ash pit to empty her ash pan

I noticed inside the oil store that what last week had been a pair of scissors chained to the bench at the back was now just a scissor:

Doing things by halves

Clive has the other half and would like to reconnect them however the screw in the middle has gone AWOL.  Should you be the guilty party that broke the scissors and happen to know where the missing screw is, please return it to Clive.  He was last seen muttering dark things about sticking pins into a voodoo doll of the culprit, so if you are suddenly experiencing sharp and otherwise inexplicable pains, you'll now know why. 

We have another new hose by the ash pit now, for connecting up to locos that have fitments to sprinkle water directly into the ash pan:

Steve, Ade and Cliff wait for the new hose to finish damping down the ash pan

 Chris was firing the 8F today.  Being one of the leading lights of the Churchill 8F group, he was more than happy to be firing his own loco.  I think he was saying something about having slightly over-prepped his fire at this point, but I couldn't hear him over the background noise.

Chris and some rather low cloud formations over the safety valves

Chris claimed mitigating circumstances when he got back at the end of the day saying that the safety valves were blowing light at 215 rather than 225 PSI.  I'll try and remember that for next week when I'm down for a training turn on the 8F.

Once the 8F had set off to join the stock in the platform and breakfast had been consumed, it was time to check up on the jobs that were in progress in the yard.  Andy was cracking on with 4270 and by the time he had finished her smoke box was a very smart looking gloss black:

Photo courtesy of Andy Beale

 Several others carried on with stripping down Foremarke Hall:

Tim repainted the smoke box...

...whilst John & Ade removed the brakes

Paul got the job of pressure washing the elements of the brake assembly that were removed:

How many footplate men does it take to fix a pressure washer?

John gets it going at last.  Paul is ready to start cleaning the brake parts.

One of the recent batch of fork lift truck graduates discovered that using it to shift things such as re-railers out of the oil store means having to turn the thing round in a fairly confined space.  A task which proved to be rather difficult as it turns out.  I won't name the culprit for fear of getting an even worse report than usual on my next firing lesson.  He won't like the fact that I was reminded of this classic song that describes the difficulties that can be experienced getting vehicles out of tight spaces. 

Fork lift in a fix

I have an interest in getting Dinmore Manor ready for service on our line, for reasons which will become apparent in a few weeks time, so I rather foolishly approached Mark and asked what needed doing on her.  Well the answer was that we have taken delivery of a tender borrowed from the Dukedog, 9017 Earl of Berkeley. Earl of Berkeley is a resident of the Bluebell railway in Kent and has been out of ticket for a few years.  The tender is already in BR black however it needed a bit of a clean, both internally and externally as well as a few coats of paint in the coal space and around the water inlet before it could be used.  I've been inside a tender before and knew that it wasn't going to be a pleasant job.  Sure enough, everybody within earshot either made themselves scarce, pretended to be extremely busy doing important things or came up with lame excuses why it shouldn't be them "Old war wound don't you know". Some thought that I might fall for flattery "Well you're far thinner than me Ray".  Having just devoured a full English breakfast in the Flag and Whistle,the last thing I was feeling was thin. 

Three Churchward 3500 gallon tenders in this shot.

Before heading into the bowels of the tender, I took a few photos of the people who grabbed the cleaner jobs.  I'm sure that one of the reasons they wanted me to go in there was that they'd be safe from my camera for a while:

Ralph painting the coal space

Ade (l) and Martin (r) got on with painting the water tank filler end

Martin recommended that the best way to clean the inside of a tender is to get a cat, strap a banger onto its tail and throw it in.  As Toddington has no station cat we couldn't follow up on that plan, so it was down to me to get in there. Mercifully nobody strapped a firework to my tail before I went in.   

Tender water tanks are usually rather damp inside (the clue is in the name) however this one had been out of use for a while, so if I was lucky it might be fairly dry: 

Perhaps my luck is in, it looks dry down there.

Only one way to find out, I dropped down inside and once a light had been hooked up and passed in had a look around. I was in luck, it was bone dry in there.  Aside from the expected industrial quantities of loose flaky rust, I was surprised to find quite a large number of what appear to be shells from dead water snails:

It would seem that the Bluebell railway gets their water from a river

No live ones in there, I suppose that they don't fare very well without water to live in.

For those of you that have never inspected the inside of a tender before, they have baffle plates inside to stop the water sloshing around whilst traversing bends and potentially destabilising them.  That's all well and good until you need to get in there and move from one section to another.  Churchward designed these things in an era when the practice of sending 5 year old children up chimneys to sweep them had not long since been discontinued, consequently the passages through the baffle plates had been designed to accommodate at best teenage boys, malnourished teenage boys at that.  

Anorexics only need apply

There's no real sense of scale to that photo, but the bucket I was using to sweep the rust into wouldn't fit through any of those apertures.  I had to ask Ade to fetch me the smallest bucket he could find, which only just made it through the largest of those round holes.  I managed to squeeze through the one at the bottom, just, by lying on my back and shimmying in. When my feet hit the next baffle plate I had to twist sideways to get the rest of me in.  I really wouldn't have wanted to try to get from one section to another if there had still been any water in there.

The tender is split internally into 4 sections on each side.  In the third section, the water level gauge float is strategically placed to block entry into the fourth section:

Water level gauge float impeding progress.

The float raised and lowered quite easily, but I didn't fancy trying to shimmy into the fourth section as it would be resting on my face as I crawled underneath it.  I elected to poke a broom in through one of the holes and sweep it out from the third section on each side.

I could almost reach all the way to the front this way.

One of a number of bucket loads of rust and water snail shells emerging into daylight

Yes, I was using the 'light up bucket'.  I cleaned it up afterwards and put it back where it came from.  Hopefully Clive won't notice that I've used it for the wrong thing, apparently he has quote an extensive collection of voodoo dolls!

At one point, I heard a muffled voice outside ask "Who's in there?".  When the disembodied voice had discovered that it was me, there was a considerable clanging as hands hammered on the tender sides. It was quite deafening in the confined space.  Mike confessed to being the culprit later.  I might be able to find a use for one of Clive's voodoo dolls myself!

I finally emerged back into the daylight with the last bucket load of rust etc from inside the tender looking rather like I had used my overalls to clean it with.  Needless to say, it was the first wearing of a freshly laundered pair of overalls.  

Inside of the tender cleaned, it was now time to crack on with the outside.  It had only been painted black a few years ago and it scrubbed up rather well.  I was quite pleased with the end result:

Not looking at all bad

Meanwhile, feverish activity was taking place on Dinmore Manor herself.  Not least of the outstanding tasks was weighing her to make sure that her weight was evenly distributed across each wheel.  Without doing this, she might end up with too much weight being placed on one of her springs causing the spring to break.

On the scales

She'd had a warming fire put in her on Friday and Dan had re-lit her and got her slowly into steam during the course of the day:

Still with Foremarke Hall's tender whilst the Dukedog's was being cleaned & painted

Slowly building up the fire during the day

By the time that the 8F was back on shed at the end of the day, Dinmore Manor was pretty much up to the red line on her pressure gauge:

All steamed up and ready to go

Well it would have been a shame to let all that steam go to waste wouldn't it!  So as sun was starting to go down, Dinmore Manor moved under her own steam to the south head shunt and back for the first time:

Getting ready to go

Drain cocks open....

.... and she's off.

Underway at last.

The use of the 4000 gallon Hawksworth tender from Foremarke Hall is quite possibly a first for a Manor.  A little research has shown Manors occasionally ran with a Churchward 4000 gallon tender and briefly with a Collett one, but not as far as I have been able to determine with a Hawksworth 4000 gallon tender.  Another first for the GWSR.  Now that the Dukedog's 3500 gallon Churchward tender is pretty much ready for service, she'll soon be back to looking as BR intended back in 1950, so this curious pairing will be short lived.

After the first run, there was a stop for checking that nothing was hotter than it should have been and that there were no leaks from places that shouldn't be leaking:

Dinmore Manor appears to have eaten Mark

Andy checks for leaks in the smoke box

The inspection process took a fair while, which was a bit of a shame as there was a spectacular sunset going on, all it needed was Dinmore Manor placed in the foreground.  By the time she did steam up and down the yard again, the light had all but gone and I couldn't get enough shutter speed and the depth of field for the shot that I really wanted:

Afterglow

Light all but gone

15 minutes earlier and I'd have been on to a winner.