Classified

They say that you shouldn't get dressed in the dark.  The same is true of cleaning steam locomotives.  When the sun finally did come up on Sunday morning, I spotted plenty of bits that I had missed by the light of my head torch and had to go back to finish the job.  Still, the lack of light first thing in the morning allowed for an atmospheric photo or two of the day's locos in the dark:

8274 and Foremarke Hall snoozing on shed

When the sun finally did deign to put in an appearance, at least it made a bit of an effort:

The sun rises over Foremarke Hall

I was booked on to clean Foremarke Hall, but as nobody was rostered to clean the 8F, I found myself cleaning both.  They were rather grimy from the day before as well so there was plenty to do.  Neither was completely sparkling by the time they came to go off shed, but they did at least look distinctly better than when I started.

Once they had both disappeared and I'd popped into the Flag & Whistle for breakfast, it was time to look around and see what was happening.  The David Page shed was bereft of life, though signs of activity from the day before were to be found:

35006 now has a handrail on one of it's smoke deflectors

Although the inside of the David Page shed bears no resemblance to the inside of Old Oak Common shed in the 1950's, we still had a pleasing line up of GWR motive power on hand:

L->R, 4270, 2807 & 5542

So where was everybody?  Well as it turns out, this coming weekend is the Diesel Railcar and Steam weekend.  The steam locos benefit from being cleaned before each working day, so of course they will always look superb, but the same is not true of the diesel railcars.  Consequently a good DMU polishing session was in progress.  DMU's have a lot more bodywork than a steam loco, so it takes quite a bit of elbow grease to buff them up to a high gloss.  Not only that, but the Cotswold Diesel Railcar Group have bought another one:

Newly arrived 51360 in BR blue

It wasn't the new car though that was receiving attention, but the three car class 117.  With just a bit of work, it scrubs up quite nicely.  You could certainly tell which bits had been done and which bits hadn't:

No doubt as to how far we had got

Meanwhile, Foremarke Hall and 8274 made their way up and down the line, kicking out smoke.  We feared that our good work might be undone before the the Diesel Railcar & Steam weekend arrived.

Foremarke Hall sets off from Toddington

After a while, some tired of applying good old fashioned elbow grease and turned to 21st Century technology to polish the DMU:

Neil and George buffing up the DMU the easy way

At this point in the proceedings, things become a little tricky for the writer of this blog.  The driver of Foremarke Hall was on his driving exam.  I knew that he had passed out as he shouted down from the cab 'will you be joining us on the next trip then?'.  It would have been churlish to have said no, so I did indeed join him & Fireman Chris for the last trip.  Unfortunately the newly qualified driver has been overcome by a severe bout of shyness that I had hitherto not suspected, and he has requested that I keep his name and picture out of the blog:

Here he is being congratulated by Inspector, Chris Irving

Later on, here he is, the only qualified driver on the footplate with his hand on the regulator as we set off to Cheltenham:

Mystery hand on the regulator

At least he has managed to lay his hand on the regulator which is rather more than can be said of his erstwhile instructor who apparently couldn't find it when on the footplate the day before. 

Chris was keen to see me fire and threatened to take photos to upload onto the blog. well that wasn't going to happen of course, but regardless, Chris fired to Cheltenham and I fired back. Chris of course only passed out as a fireman earlier this year, but he still managed to make it all look easy.  I rather like this study of Chris by the light of Foremarke Hall's fire as we neared the exit of Greet tunnel:

Chris making it look easy

For the return journey, we had enough steam and water.  We didn't blow off either.  I wouldn't like to say that I had made it look easy though.  Our new driver had a bit of a reception committee waiting to congratulate him:

Everybody else had already gone to the pub to wait for him there

We now have new instructions in place for loco disposal which start with the premise that we come off the train within 20 psi of the red line, but not blowing off and with three quarters of a glass.  As I was firing back, it fell to me to achieve this task:

Happy with that

Needless to say, I won't be able to do that when I have my next firing lesson, but at least I've managed it once.