Kicking the Bucket

I awoke from my slumbers on Sunday morning, an hour or two before stupid O'clock to the sound of heavy rain beating down on my bedroom window. It continued relentlessly as I made my way to Toddington. I was drenched by the time that I had negotiated my way from the car park to the signing on point, this wasn’t going to be a good day. My crumb of comfort was that my rostered loco for the day was 35006, with it’s nice warm and fully enclosed cab. I would be able to gloat over the crew of the other loco, 2807, which when running tender first was extremely exposed to the elements. 35006 is of course a Merchant Navy class of steam locomotive, I fondly imagined myself sailing serenely over the stormy waves of the floods that were sure to accompany the biblical quantity of rain that had fallen over night. As it turned out, there were no floods along the line to sail serenely over, the GWSR’s line side drainage team have done an excellent job in getting surplus water from the Cotswold side of the line to the Malvern side, without letting it linger where we don’t want it. On the down side though, 35006’s cab isn’t quite as water proof as I had imagined, the rubber cover between the cab roof and the tender has yet to be fitted, and there are a few gaps in various places in the roof where the rain can penetrate.

Note the gap twixt tender and cab

There had been a partial crew change recently, I now had Phil as a trainee driver, (under the tutelage of Andy), whereas I had previously had Chris. My theory is that trainee drivers get the worst firemen, on the principle that if they can cope OK with them, then they can cope with anything. It’s not impossible of course that Phil had simply done something to annoy the roster clerk.

Phil, oiling up 35006

Upon swimming to arriving at my locomotive, I was pleased to find that it still had 60 PSI on the clock and half a glass of water, pretty much the ideal start. An easy to use rocking grate, makes quick work of dropping the remaining ash into the ash pan.

A very nice start

Graham was the cleaner, not only had he arrived before me, but had already emptied out the smoke box for me (under the instruction of Phil) and he then set about cleaning the vast acreage of boiler casing in the pouring rain. This is no easy task, I distinctly remember cleaning the boiler of 35006 before the “Big Four” gala a few years ago, definitely a non-trivial exercise

Graham, cleaning 35006 in the rain

I couldn’t help but notice that in contrast, Eleanor, the cleaner for 2807, had wisely set about putting up the storm sheet and then cleaning anything that could be cleaned in the cab.

Eleanor, keen to stay dry.

Amongst the items yet to be fitted to 35006, are the pep pipe and the tender sprinkler. On a day like Sunday, that wasn’t going to matter at all, unpleasant coal dust blowing around in the cab wasn’t going to be an issue. Getting the coal where I could reach it was, and once again, Graham braved the rain, this time to pull coal forward.

Graham, in the rain once more

Although 35006 has only been in service for a precious few weeks, Sunday was the third occasion on which I had been fortunate enough to be the fireman on it. This scarcely makes me an expert, however, as I know that a fair few of my fellow firemen (and firewoman) haven’t been so lucky, it’s worth spending a few moments describing the sort of thing that they can expect that is different to the GWR locos that we are all used to.

One difference to GWR locos is that to operate the injectors, you need to open a water valve by the fireman’s seat, and then open a steam valve. Both injectors are side by side, so alternating between them if you want to is easy, no need to wander across to the driver’s side of the cab.

Injectors

 The four knurled valves are (left to right) front injector, water, steam, then rear injector  steam then water.  They are labelled.   The steam feed on the right gets a little tight towards the end of its travel when being closed off, and will leak steam past until you give it that extra little nudge to make sure that it is fully closed. With operating pressure, both injectors pick up cleanly with full water and nearly full steam. At lower boiler pressures, you’ll need to back off on the water to stop it running wet. Note, the two valves on the far left of the photo, the top one will be for the pep pipe, the bottom one is for the ash pan sprinkler. A lot of water from that emerges out of the side of the ash pan on the fireman’s side when that is operated.

Before the steam valves for the injectors can operate, the feeds from the manifold need to have been fully opened. These take a surprisingly large number of turns to open, but really do eventually come to a hard stop, rather than fall out in your hand.

Manifold valves

The injectors are fed by the two on the right, the third one in from the right is the steam heat, which needs to be turned many times before any pressure at all appears on the steam heat pressure gauge. They’re all going to be hot, so use gloves or a rag when operating any of the valves on the manifold.

A rather useful feature is that the blower is operated by levers connected by a linking rod on both sides of the cab. GWR practice is to have the blower on the driver’s side, so if the driver doesn’t notice a blow back coming into the cab, the poor old fireman has to reach across the Firehole door to get to it. GWR firemen are it seems rather more expendable than drivers. The 8F when it was on the GWSR, had the blower directly over the Firehole door, indicating that the LMS were happy to risk the wellbeing of their crews equally. There are of course two water gauge frames on the backhead, much as I love GWR locos, I feel much happier with two. I’ve never had to change a water gauge glass on the road, and I very much hope never to have to, but having a spare gauge to look at rather than play about with test cocks has to be an improvement.

I don’t seem to have managed to get a photo of the infinitely variable dampers, one for the front and one for the rear, arranged front at the front, and rear, by a process of elimination at the rear, but they are simple to operate and effective. It is worth noting that they also allow ingress of air at the sides, which means that the area above them on the sides of the firebox burns through rather quicker, so you’ll need to keep an eye on that and make sure those spots are filled.

Much has been made of the hike in the coal bill associated with running 35006. I don’t subscribe to the theory that there will be more than a modest rise in coal consumption, in spite of the fact that it has twice the grate area of our other locos. I’ll stick my neck out a bit here and explain why. Elementary physics dictates that more energy will be required to boil a larger volume of water (yes, 35006 loses there), but, there is a set amount of power required to pull a loco and seven carriages from one end of the line to the other, the variables are going to be how heavy the loco is (OK, 35006 loses on this count), how efficient the boiler is at producing steam (Running at 250 PSI and thermic syphons will help 35006 here), how steam tight the boiler and steam passages are (35006 is practically fresh out of the box and scores well on this front), how well thermally insulated the boiler is (the larger volume to surface area ratio of a big boiler will help 35006 retain heat too), I presume that the under-cladding insulation will be similar on all our locos (You’ll be pleased to learn that asbestos hasn’t been used for such purposes in many a long year). General friction and brake drag will of course have an effect, but I don’t imagine that is much better or worse on 35006 than any of our other locos. The fact that there are three cylinders rather than two to feed is just a distraction, once under way, 35006 runs at much lower cut offs (assuming that the driver is on the ball) and consequently uses rather less steam per cylinder than an equivalent two cylinder design running at the same speed. A significant variable is how well it is fired, excessive blowing off will result in much of the coal’s energy being released to warm up the atmosphere rather than move the train.

Just for the record, this was on the second trip, when Graham was firing.

 There are three safety valves. I have only heard one lift, but that is plenty loud enough (imagine a Vulcan bomber flying fifty feet above your head, but with no dopplar shift). It will keep blowing until the pressure has dropped back to 225 PSI (it blows at around 246 or so)

In practice, a thin layer of coal across the grate, with a slightly thicker back end for the back third of the grate will be enough to get you from Toddington to Cheltenham Race Course (CRC) without further recourse to the shovel, except to fill in any gaps that may appear on the grate. Even then, you’ll struggle to keep it quiet at CRC. Coming back the other way, will require some intermediate shovelling, but very little if you’re to keep it quiet at Toddington. I have no doubt that if so inclined, it would be possible to “box it up” a bit at CRC, and not touch the shovel at all until back at Toddington. The “elephant in the room” that I have failed to mention thus far of course is that the driver and fireman are on opposite sides of the cab compared to a GWR loco. Like 9 in 10 people, I’m right handed, so I don’t adapt to the wrong side of the cab naturally. Phil made certain threats, which he carried out when I appeared on his side of the cab, shovel in hand. I didn’t threaten to retaliate by mentioning his impressive wheel slip in the tunnel, so I won’t…. oops!

Unlike me, Graham was a bit of a natural at firing from the wrong side

A photo that will doubtless soon grace Phil’s social media account.

Although ostensibly similar to the 9F that we had for the recent gala, having similar size boilers and wide fireboxes, the two are remarkably different, think shire horse and grand national winner. One was designed to plough fields and pull heavy loads at low speeds, all day long, the other is meant to sprint, perhaps for shorter distances, but sprint nonetheless.

That’s enough of the differences between 35006 and the rest of our home fleet for now. In spite of the forecast, the weather improved considerably on Sunday, so much so that by the time 2807, running as train 2 went out, they had decided to dispense with the storm sheet.

Andy knows how to keep the crew happy, he generously procured bacon butties for us all

Andy, enjoying breakfast

Phil gets to grips with the big red handle

Crossing at Winchcombe after the first trip, 2807 appears without its storm sheet and a jubilant crew.

It’s worth noting, that the water space in 35006's tender, tapers towards the top of the tank. For a given rate of flow through the water crane, the rate of ascent of the water level over time will increase. Graham misjudged that and got damp boots as his reward.

Graham called for the water to be turned off, just a little too late

We crossed 2807 at Winchcombe, the crew were rather happy that the rain had stopped.

So confident of the rain staying away that they had taken down the storm sheet

Ian Crowder, our press spokesman, and fellow member of the gala committee was a passenger on the train. Ian is something of a Southern Railway fan, and having unfortunately not been able to attend the gala, was keen to make up and see 35006 in action for himself.

Ian (l) and Andy

Phil had been having a good day, it had been his birthday fairly recently, so he had brought along one of his presents:

Apparantly there is now a Thomas character called Philip

Added to that, Phil managed to bake a potato in the smokebox as he went...

Spud-you-like

…and generally have a fairly relaxing time:

Phil... feet up!

For the third round trip, we had a visitor on the footplate; Ray had been a fireman at Guildford in the mid-sixties, frequently firing Q1’s, and various Bulleid light pacifics, with the occasional Merchant Navy thrown in.

Ray

Once at CRC, Ray got off and Graham re-joined us. Somewhere fairly soon into the journey, Graham managed to kick over the water bucket.  It amused everybody else that I was distracted for just long enough to not quite get an injector on in time to prevent 35006 from blowing off.

Graham sweeps away the spilt water

 Needless to say, the crew of 2807 were safely back and drinking tea by the time that we finally returned to Toddington. Pretty much as soon as we got off the stock, the heavens had opened once more. The usual shunting of stock into the north siding followed at the end of the day, along with disposal. Ashing out 35006 is a bit of a job, there are the side hoppers to be hosed down and emptied, followed by the ones in the middle. The loco needs to be parked exactly at the spot on the pit that permits access into the pit at the southern end, yet is far enough down to permit getting under the ash pan at the north end.

Graham emptying out one of the outside hoppers

 Getting a hosepipe trained onto the centre hopper is a tortuous task, and depends on the loco being positioned exactly right on the pit.

Damping down the centre section of the ash pan at the front.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and rain means puddles and reflections, which always appeal to the photographer in me.

In the rain on platform 2

On the ash pit

35006

Returning to shed, we discovered that our newest diesel restoration project was out for a test run. I think that its first public train will be for the diesel gala at the end of July.

5

Clas 37, D6948

There is a new adornment in the mess coach:

12+2=5... apparently

I have no idea where it came from, or why it happens to be there. My admittedly by now rather rusty grasp of elementary maths leads me to suspect that there is something not quite right here. 

Finally, Tina did her 40 mile sponsored walk along a section of the Cotswold Way last weekend, in torrential rain, taking 17 hours from start to finish. You can't help but be impressed that she kept on going, when many others would have given up.  She would like to thank everybody who sponsored her.