Off My Rocker

Where better to start, than with the news that the GWSR has another blog.  At this point, I am imagining groans of despair at the thought of "death by blog", but no, this is a very worthy addition to the family of blogs available on the GWSR.  There is now a "Broadway Extension Blog" wherein you will find all the latest news regarding our progress towards Broadway from Laverton from the track laying point of view.  Handily, if like me you find it easiest to keep up to speed with the blog updates by looking at the news section of the main website, you'll find that it is linked to from there.

 I haven't mentioned the cleaning rag collection point for a while, but it continues to be a great success, thank you all for your support.  The dark days of the 2013 gala when we were reduced to cutting up towels from the washroom of the mess coach to clean and light up locos with are now but a distant bad memory.  You even seem to be providing them faster than I can shift them to the oil store:

Yet another bag load had arrived before I emptied it

Dinmore Manor is in the middle of a programme of early winter repairs at the moment and I had allowed myself to be talked into helping out on Saturday.  The weather forecast was grim, and because of the concreting etc, there was no option to move her into the nice warm dry David Page shed.  

First thing to note was that Dinmore Manor wasn't quite as clean as I had thought she was last week, the tender in particular is still in need of some TLC:

The cycling lion's personal hygiene was called into question

Amongst the list of ailments being addressed in the current set of works on Dinmore Manor, is that the rockers have slightly out of tolerance bearings (I paraphrased slightly there, but I can't use the exact quote from one of DMLL's directors).  The out of tolerance bearings are believed to be the cause of the slightly off valve timing (again, I paraphrase).  Today's task was to extract the rockers and get new bearings made.

Mike had got himself down for a spot of mainline running behind a pair of panniers on Saturday, so he and Dan had appeared on Friday to make a head start on the safety valves and the right hand rocker.  Paul and I picked up where he had left off with the left hand one.

Dinmore Manor, waiting on the rain

As can be seen here the right hand rocker was out (far side).  This one was still awaiting removal.

The task in hand

 First, the eccentric rod needed disconnecting from the rocker.  There was the inevitable castle nut and split pin to negotiate first.  Needless to say, the split pin didn't give in without a fight.  Eventually it succumbed to brute force, ignorance and a sharp hack saw.

The recalcitrant split pin.

 Next was to remove the cap on the far end of the bearing.  The two nuts and bolts on the near side came away easily enough, the nuts came off the studs on the far side easily too.  All that remained was to lift the cap free, over the two studs.  Sounds simple, but there was a fairly large boiler in the way.  I had little doubt that the rocker caps had been put in place before the boiler was installed during the last rebuild, I was wondering if it was possible to remove the cap without lifting the boiler.  Once again, brute force and ignorance won the day.  I was informed later that the boiler cladding should have a cut out to allow for the removal of the rocker caps, but needless to say didn't.

Rocker caps removed

As I was the only person qualified to take part in a shunting operation that Mark could find, I got collared to help shunt a few things around. This was my first opportunity to take part in a shunt since qualifying to do so by passing out as a fireman. A line of locos needed shifting out of the way so that a mini 360 degree digger could cut a trench in the yard:

The mini 360 degree digger

 The stuff to be shunted out of the way was 2807, freshly arrived back from the NYMR this week, which wanted taking round to the old ash pit for a check over, 5542, the "Planet's Favourite Prairie" also returned this week and a milk tanker.  The PFP will be particularly welcome with the crews if the weather over the Santa season stays like this.  There's nothing like a nice warm, fully enclosed cab on a filthy winter's day.

Shunter, 11230, 2807, 5542 and milk tanker on the move.

Digger now with access and the FLT can now get access to removed the spoil.

By this point it was hammering down with rain, lacking a snorkel and flippers, being out in the yard any longer didn't seem like a good idea, I decided to see what was happening inside that nice warm dry David Page shed: 

It was full steam ahead on 35006 by its restoration team.  Apparently the holes in the cab for the driver's cab window frame had been drilled exactly as per the drawing, unfortunately, the ex-BR window frame hadn't.  

Filling the old holes and creating new

 Meanwhile, up at the other end, work continued apace with the steam pipes:

Steam pipe number one installed.

Attaching the cladding around the steam pipe was next on the list, apparently not an easy task.

A small team of people had found a nice dry job to do on Foremarke Hall.  Phil and Sean were hard at work on reinstalling the brake rigging:

Phil on the outside of the frames

 Meanwhile, Sean was working on the inside.  Either Sean has changed gender and religion, or he was trying to avoid my camera:

Facing Mecca?

 Speaking of changes, Foremarke Hall appears to have metamorphosed into 5017, which is castle class, "The Gloucestershire Regiment".  

Don't ask me why, I have no idea

Whatever was going on, there was no sign of an extra pair of cylinders between the frames.

As it was still hammering down outside, I helped out with extracting the taper fit pin on the rocker shaft that had been extracted from Dinmore Manor on Friday.  It didn't want to budge.  We applied some heat.

Note the hands being warmed at the top right

 Once again, more brute force and ignorance was brought to bear as well as heat, which in this case involved me clouting it with a very large hammer.  Unfortunately, the heat had no effect on either freeing up the pin, or on drying out my overalls.

Old bearing (top) and blanks from which new ones will be machined.

 Still it wouldn't budge, we tried a bit of thermal shock by rapidly cooling it with water:

Well that's one way of making steam!

 But still no joy.  More heat, and plenty more brute force and ignorance were applied, until eventually the taper broke free and the pin just popped out.

It's down there on the floor

Still  being extremely hot, the pin was taken outside for a cooling in one of the many puddles that we had:

The puddle promptly evaporated

Jeff returns triumphantly with the now fairly cool pin.

Meanwhile, Paul who had earlier been assisting me with the rocker removal on Dinmore Manor had found something dry to do himself.  He was being instructed on "Shunting and Yard Safety" by Tim in preparation for a written exam.  Being no fool, Tim had declared it to be unsafe out in the yard at the moment, the safety hazard being the strong likelihood of drowning, and had ventured into the shed instead:

Tim (l) and Paul, safely shunted themselves into the shed

So what was the 360 degree digger mentioned earlier trying to dig?  Well on Wednesday. there had been a concrete pour in the yard for the base of a water tower.  The digger was cutting a trench for the water pipe that will supply it.

Shuttering in place on Wednesday, photo courtesy of Peter Gutteridge

It was suggested by Mark, that the rocker that we had freed up was too heavy to lift out manually, and that the best thing would be to shunt Dinmore Manor back towards the shed a bit, to where access could be gained by the FLT, and lift it out that way.  The only snag was that access to road 9 was blocked by the shuttering that had been set up for the base of the about to be installed water tower.  We'd best go and remove it then.

Mark gets cracking with his electric screwdriver

 Meanwhile, David tackled the large nuts on the four studs set into the concrete

it required a 2" Whitworth spanner as I recollect

 Unsurprisingly some of the shuttering had managed to get embedded into the concrete and didn't want to budge:

(l-r), David, Martin, Mark & Tony beat it into submission

 In the end we got most of the shuttering off  and certainly enough to permit access by a shunter to shift Dinmore Manor.  The chap in the digger (sorry no idea of his name) made an excellent job of cutting the trench for the water supply pipe:

Neat job.

After all that, we still didn't fetch the shunter round, but carried on extracting the rocker the hard way:

Plenty of people taking the strain

 It was lowered down onto a waiting trolley:

Sean seems to have abandoned his new religion

 Once in the shed, I got it set up on a bench and more in hope than expectation applied a gentle blow to the pin after removing the castle nut and split pin.  Two fairly gentle taps and it popped out.  After all the grief of getting the first one out, I was more than pleasantly surprised.

The rocker and its pin, prior to removal

And finally, it's not exactly news as I've been sitting on this story for the best part of a year now.  If you recall, I mentioned on a blog post in the middle of December that a film crew had been at work on the GWSR, but that for contractual reasons it couldn't be reported on at the time.  Well now that the film is shortly to be released, I can reveal that the film is "Nativity 3: Dude Where's My Donkey".  Aside from the human stars of the film, Foremarke Hall also plays a starring role.  If like me you missed out on the first two Nativity films, I am assured by my youngest daughter that they are "wicked". I understand this to be the modern ironic use of the adjective "wicked" rather than anything to do with the nature of witches. 

There were plenty of film crews with expensive looking cameras about:

Like these two

 Foremarke Hall was the obvious star of the show for me

Waiting for her big part

The crew and other volunteers seemed to be a bit excited....

... a bit too excited even.

 Finally, it was time for some direction by the director.  Foremarke Hall was perfect and didn't fluff a single one of her lines.

Paul, Ben and John receiving their orders from the director

 The human star of the show present for the filming was Martin Clunes, star of sitcoms such as Men Behaving Badly and Doc Martin as well as many other films and tv programmes.

Martin wasn't behaving badly, Ian on the other hand....

At the end of the filming on the GWSR