48???

Saturday morning saw another group of people taking fork lift training:

(L-R) Chris, Steve and Mike (instructor)

This season, we mostly seem to have abandoned the more usual for railways, orange hi-viz in favour of lime green. Well all apart from Steve, who has abandoned hi-viz altogether.  The third student was Sean who was still to be seen wearing last season's fashion.

Sean in outmoded orange

Notice how the threat of fork lift training has managed to clear the car park of cars, well all bar that one car in the background.  I didn't inspect it for damage later, but I very much doubt that it will have escaped unscathed.

A few final bits of maintenance work were being carried out on the 8F.  I'm loathe to refer to the 8F by its number (currently 8274) as it changes on a fairly regular basis (8476, WD 348 and Turkish Railways 45160 at various times as well as 8274).  Added to that, she will be changed again for the Back to Black steam gala in May to something else.  Don't ask me what, I don't know yet. As she'll be in some form of BR livery, I'd guess that the first two digits will be 48, after that, your guess is as good as mine. Furthermore, numerically, 8274 is far too easy to confuse with 2874, so on this blog at least she will just have to remain simply as being 'the 8F'. Anyway, Mike was busy working on the Wakefield lubricators. He's hopefully cured the water ingress and fitted new seals to the pumps, so now the oil should flow to where it is required rather better than before.

Mike fitting the new seals to the oil pumps

 Meanwhile up by the tender, Ade and Nick were stripping down the axle boxes and cleaning them out:

Nick and Ade, sitting down on the job.

Nick's mum, Tonia was busy painting the inside of the coal spaces of various locos.  It would be easy to literally paint yourself into a corner, so Tonia wisely left the base of the bunker to last so that she could exit back onto the footplate of 5542:

Finishing off the bunker of 5542

Then later working on Foremarke Hall's tender

Not technically really anything to do with the steam loco dept, other than the fact that it's owned by several steam loco dept memebers, one of the DMU cars has been hiding in the David Page shed having some corroded body panels removed and new ones let in.  Here Neil reinstates some of the woodwork of the door frame behind a new section:

Neil prepares the door frame for fitting.

George inserted the new section of body panel last week and now that it has been primed, you can't see the join at all.

The current major focus of attention of course is still on Foremarke Hall and preparing her for sending her boiler to Tyseley for overhaul.  All the tubes are now out, the last of the flue tubes having been removed on Wednesday.  Cleaning out the residual muck in the boiler was a job that came my way.  I looked for a carpet to sweep it under, but sadly one wasn't to be found, so I ended up removing it one bucket full at a time:

Before: Lots of muck in there.

After: You could eat your dinner off of it

Well ok, perhaps you wouldn't really want to eat your dinner off of it, but it was definitely an improvement on what it was like before.  On Wednesday, the plan is that she will be dragged onto the pit and somebody will venture in there with the pressure washer to finish the job.  Hopefully some kind soul will take pictures for me to incorporate in the next blog post.

Meanwhile a small team of people worked on detaching the front of the smoke box. Rivets were initially removed by gas-axe, but later they moved onto using a pneumatic hammer.  No photos of that bit, it was too loud to approach:

John giving the rivets a little heat therapy

Will took over for a while

The next big thing to come off was the boiler cladding.  The nameplates were in the way, so a nice easy task was to unbolt them.

The one I removed

Tim removing the other one

Once the nameplates were off, the tricky bit started. We needed to remove all the screws/bolts/straps holding the boiler cladding in place.

Clive coaxing one of the more recalcitrant fittings to come free

 The boiler cladding is held on by amongst other things, a set of screws underneath.  Normally getting underneath isn't a problem, we'd just shunt her onto a pit and under we go.  Today however the weather wasn't conducive to going outside onto one of the pits, so it was a case of getting underneath where she stood.  "We need somebody young and slim" said John looking in my direction.  "Young and slim" in this case being a euphemism for 'expendable' or possibly 'dumb enough to fall for flattery'.  If you're not on a pit, the options for getting between the frames are very limited.  One option might be to clamber up onto the running plate and see if you can squeeze yourself in underneath the boiler.  I tried that and swiftly came to the conclusion that all bar the most advanced anorexic couldn't make it in that way.  The brake rigging bars entry between the driving wheels, so the only viable option would be to crawl in through the gap between the front bogie and the leading driving wheels.  Unfortunately where Foremarke Hall was stood, by the doors of the shed, rain had come in underneath and that spot held a rather uninviting oily puddle.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I found a plank of wood to use as a crawling board to get mostly over the puddle, crawled halfway in and then turned left and crawled on under a variety of obstacles until finally I found enough room to stand up somewhere in the vicinity of the eccentric rods.

The way I got in... you can see the plank on the ground in the middle

After that it was simply a matter of unscrewing the screws holding the cladding together if they would unscrew, or pointing out the error of their ways to them with an angle grinder if they wouldn't.

Before starting... note the strap to prevent the cladding springing apart and clouting me in the face

One of the separated sections after unscrewing/grinding

Needless to say, lunch time arrived whilst I was under there, so I had to crawl out for lunch, then crawl back in again afterwards.  The very front bit of cladding couldn't be accessed from underneath, Hawksworth had rather inconsiderately designed Modified Halls with a frame stretcher and vacuum reservoir in the way.  Somehow, the front one would have to be dealt with from the outside.  Once all the accessible ones underneath had been separated, I crawled back out and helped with removing them.  None of them gave in without a fight, except one which was held in place by a handrail mounting point.  Once I had freed it from the mounting point, it succumbed to gravity and shot off underneath the boiler, only the last foot or so being visible.  Clive saw me take the picture below and said "Don't put that on the blog". He thought that John might be a bit upset about what we'd managed to do to his lovely engine.  Needless to say, John was quite relaxed about it.

The bit of the cladding that nearly escaped under the boiler

Faced with the prospect of getting back underneath and pushing it out, or manhandling it out from above, I went with the latter.  A bit of brute force and ignorance later, out it came. 

We still had the bit of cladding at the very front of the boiler to contend with.  Access from underneath was impossible, so Steve tried reaching in from the running plate with the angle grinder:

Steve makes sparks fly

It still wasn't coming undone though, Will had a go at getting in under the boiler.  Will really does come under the heading of 'young and slim' however even he couldn't quite manage to wriggle in under there. Eventually even he gave up and did his best to reach in from the running plate instead.

Will prying the two sections of cladding apart.

Eventually it succumbed and the two sections parted company. It had proved to be a surprisingly difficult job in the end.  Heaven knows how it will all be put back together again when the time comes.

The end of the day: Foremarke Hall, with most of her cladding removed

And finally, a hot item of news is that we are expecting delivery of Dinmore Manor during the course of this week.  For the purposes of this blog, I'll refer to her by name rather than her number number, as 7820 is the same set of numerals as 2807, just in a different order. Sometimes I think  that we deliberately select engines with similar numbers just to confuse people.  I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find that 4270 gets renumbered to be 4255, just so that people will confuse her with 5542.  

There is still a bit of finishing work required, on Dinmore Manor when she gets here, however her in frames steam test is scheduled for 7th March.  Dinmore Manor Locomotive LTD are very grateful that Cotswold Steam Preservation LTD have allowed the use of their tender during the period of initial steam tests.

Gilbert, once again spent Saturday working on 2807's tender.