Water Disaster

Following on from last week's excellent news that Martin Ryan has passed out as a fireman, I have obtained from Martin a photo, not from the big day itself, but from the preceding week.  Apparently he managed to obtain this photo which was taken by a visitor to our railway:

Martin Ryan on Dinmore Manor

Martin had his first solo firing turn on Sunday.

Martin after a happy day on 4270

Peter forwarded me a photo of the continued works to concrete the floor of the David Page shed:

Concrete being leveled, photo courtesy of Peter Gutteridge

  I took the opportunity to grab a photo on Sunday, only one more pour of concrete and the first quadrant of the shed will be done apart from the painting and sealing.

Looking good so far.

 The title of this blog post, "Water Disaster" has probably raised the suspicions in some quarters that I had some contretemps this weekend and either allowed some poor loco's water level to drop too low (fusible plugs dropped, firebox crown destroyed) or alternatively got the water level too high (water carried over into the cylinders, cylinders/pistons wrecked etc).  Well no, nothing quite so disastrous and it wasn't me that was having the problems,  it was Derek.  When he arrived on Sunday morning to light up 2807, he mentioned that he'd had a problem or two with water already.  Apparently he'd used his mobile phone as an alarm clock.  Upon being woken by it, he went to the loo, only to drop his phone which made a bit of a splash.  Although swiftly retrieved, the phone now refused to work.  Kev (2807's driver on Sunday) and I made a few suggestions as to how it might be fixed, most of which were probably not very helpful.  Kev's idea of "drying it out on the shovel" seemed to me to be a promising idea, but for some reason, Derek thought better of it.

Derek's non-functional mobile phone

Derek's next problem with water, (well ok, fruit juice, but it's probably 95% water) came when he started on his breakfast just before we set off on the first trip.

Derek quaffs his vitamin C

Subsequent checking of the 'Best Before' date on the carton showed:

Dec 2011

So roughly two and a half years out of date.  This prompted Kev and myself to discuss the possible symptoms of acute food poisoning.  The good news for Derek was that Kev is a qualified first aider.

The first trip down to Cheltenham turned out to be uneventful and Derek showed few signs of problems arising from the fruit juice:

Well not too many.

Kev at the controls

I'm not sure what concerned Kev the most about the thought of Derek collapsing;  needing to administer the kiss of life, or me taking over the shovel and firing until we got to the next station.

As you are probably aware, 2807 has only recently returned to us after an overhaul of her bottom end at Tyseley, so none of us had been out on her for quite a while.  She was also now facing south now, whereas before she had been facing north.  As a result, Kev wasn't quite sure where to stop her to line up the tender filler with the water tower at Cheltenham.  The hose on the water tower is rather old and leaky, as well as being a little shorter than most.  Kev over-shot slightly and as a consequence, the hose only just reached to the filler on 2807's tender.  Derek had handed the fire over to me for the return journey, so whilst I got on with building the fire up, he and Kev proceeded to fill up the tender with water.  Rather than ask Kev to reverse 2807 by a few feet, Derek elected to cling onto the hose and press on anyway.   Needless to say, after just a moment or two, the bucking mule that is the water tower hose tore itself out of his grip and sprayed water all over Derek and then the platform.  Kev rushed to the stop valve in the water hut, I rushed for my camera:

Decidedly damp platform... and Derek

There was supposed to be a coach party joining the train, which was running 10 or so minutes late due to heavy traffic related to a 'Race for Life' fun run.  We were told this about 2 minutes before departure time, by then of course I had nicely built up the fire and filled up the boiler for the return journey.  The fact that the safety valves were blowing off at 210 PSI rather than 225 as well as the delayed coach had an inevitable consequence.

Couldn't quite keep her quiet for the whole of the delay.

Derek made the most of the extra time to dry himself out in front of the fire.

We took water again back at Toddington.  Once more Derek went on top of the tender, whilst Kev and I remained on the platform.  Damping down the coal on hot days is to be encouraged if you want to prevent coal dust swirling around the cab.  Derek had a plan, in fact he had what might well be described as a 'cunning plan'.   He turned up the end of the water hose immediately after I had switched it off, then tried to push the hose across to the coal space so that the dregs flowing through the pipe would then land on the coal. Well that was the plan anyway.

His boots and trousers had scarcely dried from their last drenching too

After that, Derek stuck to more conventional ways of keeping the coal damped down:

It's what the pep pipe is for!

The next round trip. Derek pulled rank and sent me up on top of the tender to manage the water hose at Toddington.  The key thing is to have somebody you can trust on the water handle who stops it when you ask.  Asking just a little in advance to allow for the water still left in the pipe to flow through is a good idea too.

Kev stopped the water perfectly

At the end of the last trip, Derek had another go, and called it just a bit too late:

Oops!

 Well at least he kept his trousers dry this time, if not his boots.

During one trip, we noticed that a number of members of the diesel loco dept were taking things easy at Toddington:

Even the diesel dept have tea breaks

We found out why later on, as we were disposing 2807, they had been waiting for the service trains to finish so that they could take the class 26 out on its first test run since changing two of the traction motors (although 3 needed to be removed to make it light enough for the wheel lathe at Tyseley).

It took 47376 along for the ride

And finally, we have even more good news.  Sean Nielsen passed out as a driver on Saturday.  He tried to put me off the scent by texting me this morning to say that he had failed and that there were therefore no photos of the event.  The fact that his text arrived just as I was looking at the following photos from Jamie Christie alerted me to the fact that Sean was pulling my leg.

Sean having just passed out (photo courtesy of Jamie Christie)

Sean (R) being congratulated by Inspector Chris Irving (photo courtesy of Jamie Christie)

Congratulations Sean, a well deserved promotion.