Of Doc Holliday

17th March 2019

Welcome back. It's been Monsoon conditions here with large shallow lakes appearing in the fields on the bottom of the valley, and they tell me it snowed in Buxton this morning. We woke up to find no internet connection and whilst it is functional tonight, it ain't half slow and as my old friend would say 'flaky' It must be spring.

Monday was as always Tunstead day and the trouble with fixing air leaks is that it isn't especially photogenic, nor particularly productive. As we were going to have to re-jig the feed pipe to the driver's brake valve (which runs across in front of the cab) I opted to use the opportunity to reinstate the distinctive rotary air manifold so with assistance from Andy H we refitted that and I started reconnecting the control air lines for gearchange, etc. But actually, my first job was to try the air cleaner assembly in place to make sure it fitted. And I was rather pleased with myself because it went in a treat - the locating bits at the bottom fitted snugly and held it in place without the need to clamp it (for now), the intake slot is nicely above the top of the battery box and the outlet for the engine is at the same height, near enough, just needing a section of flexible ducting to join them together.

Granted for the picture I hadn't pushed it up as far as I intend to, but a quick check around showed that the air cleaner box behind the outer sheet will not foul anything when it does go into place. But first it needed a decision on securing it at the top. Originally I had envisaged drilling two small holes through the outer sheet and then through the casing top's guttering, but that was a shame and on further examination, I concluded that two button headed bolts under the gutter could pull on clamp plates behind, so holes were duly drilled. Andy H has started marking out the buffer beams for wasp stripes - writing that makes me think I should have bought some more yellow paint this week - but also took the two parts of the air cleaner and gave them a first coat of primer.

Pete C concentrated on pipework, re-routing the air feed to my rotary - or should that be radial? - manifold. In so doing he inadvertantly twisted the manifold itself 

but although the pipework kinked as it fought back it was returned to its previous position and all seemed OK later. I meanwhile had started on a job in the cab. When I planned out the instrument panel I had no idea of the geometry of the original (part of it appears in one photo in our collection, but little to go on) so designed a layout into a compact space. Too compact in fact, because I realised that the two ports for the duplex air gauge were too close to the tacho head underneath. I changed the gauge for one with rear entry ports, and found 3 weeks ago that I couldn't refit the panel because although the ports cleared the tacho head, with pipe adaptors into nylon pipe extending them, there was insufficient room to get pipes on without fouling the cab bulkhead. So a couple of weeks ago I drew up some special right angled adaptors to go from 3/8 BSP gauge port to 1/8 BSP, with enough 'meat' to be filed if neccessary to gain clearance to the cab bulkhead. And yes it was neccessary and yes because I cannot use my power tools without them getting a full Tarmac PAT test it had to be by good old filing. Eventually I had removed enough to squeeze the panel into place, but I might take a bit more off with a grinder when the loco comes 'home'.

While I was up in the front of the cab working on this, Pete C said I looked like 'Doc Holliday'. Now I took it he was alluding to Doc Holliday in the 'Gunfight at the OK Corral' played variously by DeForest Kelly and Kirk Douglas so assumed he was complimenting me on my rugged good looks. Unfortunately it transpired he meant Doc Brown from the 'Back to the Future' series. I think it must be about time for my annual hair cut: you can get a good deal during the sheep-shearing season.

Andy turned his attention to the brake cylinder, detaching the rigging and releasing the bolts that held it in place, after which he and I managed to man-handle it out on to the floor. We opened it up and sure enough, the piston seal had become detached and deformed, though it appeared to recover once in the open air. Last time I had put the seal in dry and it had fought all the way. This time I had remembered to bring the shed bottle of Fairy liquid (I don't think I have ever used this bottle for the purpose its makers envisaged!) smeared seal and cylinder wall and the piston slid down with a satisfying sigh of air from the inlet port on the bottom.

That can go back in next week. I also got time to change the air horn for another one from Andrew's stock. By the end of the day we had re-routed feed pipes, etc, but without the brake cylinder back in there was no point in air-testing, and I still have two known air leaks - the timing reservoir and the gear-change valve - to deal with. One of my isolating taps refuses to accept a nipple so that must be changed and the port tapping cleared. So I'll finish this report on progress with a view of the controls on RS8 to get everything into perspective.

Slap in the middle is the handbrake wheel, (the centre section underneath it will have a cover plate round it when finished) left you can see the fusebox and the battery master switch and far left the control (relay) box, which now sports a bright blue large capacitor which I'm hoping will resolve the issues with voltage drop on the timer during cranking. The brass gauge above the desk at the left is the emergency brake res gauge, and was also changed out on Monday as the original had a pin hole near the bottom of its port. The two lever valves control clutch and direction, and a green button in between (except it's masked for painting so not really green right now) 'enables' the direction lever valve which otherwise has no air to it - the real direction control valve (the one that's leaking) is just visible lower down and left. That means that the direction lever valve is pre-selective like Sentinel did on theirs - the lever valve piloting the actual one.

The rest of the week has been rather quiet by comparison to Mondays. A brand new plasma cutter arrived (we've yet to try it out) and I collected the bearing we need to renew on Ashdown. On Friday Steph and I set off to collect grandson, me via a customer and us both to collect some bits for the trailer from a supplier in the middle of Norfolk. On Saturday I was trying to catch up on a lot of outstanding paperwork and the like, including compiling a long list of jobs to get on with at the shed. When I finally did get down, I assembled a plug to the new plasma cutter and put it away and then spent most of my time on a second pipe vice that we have, mounting it on an offcut of large angle iron so that we can slap it in a vice for quick threading jobs rather than transporting the heavy and cumbersome free-standing pipe vice. (Why? Well there's one pipe to shorten to the brake cylinder tomorrow and I'm not carrying the big one to Tunstead just for that.) The Hatz was boxed off and the oil pressure lamp refitted but my intention of getting its oil changed and running it didn't happen.

Sadly grandson went back today and Andrew left me with the task of popping over to a farm near Underwood top collect a few lengths of treadplate, 6ft long. A few? There were about 30 and on a rough estimate, weighing a good 400kg. At £50 the lot we could get more by weighing it in, but Andrew's plan is to do with freeing the forklift from its incarceration and letting it roam free outside. (Phase 2 concreting is imminent.) It's just that me and the farmer loaded it, but I had to unload it all on my own.

I hadn't finished when two visitors appeared, one wanting to shake my hand having heard about the front page of the Peak Rail website. After a natter I got the unloading finished, and started re-loading the van ready for tomorrow and Tuesday but by that time there wasn't much time to start on anything else! So much for my list, at least collecting treadplate and loading had been on it, so I could tick some of it off.

I haven't plugged sales of 'The Railway to Merhead' here of late, partly because I've been waiting for more copies to arrive and partly because I've been hoping to get reviews in the mainstream railway press. Whilst they haven't appeared yet, reviews on Amazon have grown to 3 and today the influential site 'Railway Blogger' has published a lengthy one, read that here. If you haven't come across this site before, you might well want to allot some time for a more thorough investigation! If you haven't bought my book yet - shame on you - and if you don't want to go to Amazon for it, I hold copies for sales here at £11.95 + £3 p&p.

A couple of weeks ago I put out a statement about the Peak Rail newsletter, issued early in March last year under the signature of Peter Waterman, which had made a number of inaccurate assertions about me and had impinged on my good name. I did so with my solicitors' blessing because, quite frankly, I was fed up with the solicitors acting for Peak Rail seemingly stalling for time after we had disproved their principle allegation that I had made 'spurious complaints to the ORR' with a letter confirming this from the ORR itself. (A copy of this letter - with some irrelevant parts redacted - was supplied to a Peak Rail plc Director late last year). In the end they took us right 'to the wire' before offering an apology which has now been put up on the homepage of the Peak Rail website. It is a little weasel-worded 'Peak Rail accepts that Mr Briddon says..' rather than 'Peak Rail accepts that it was just plain wrong' but I'm sure you can all see that the truth is finally being conceded. Do pop in and see - it will only be up for a fortnight, but part of the settlement is that it also goes out with the AGM notice so that ALL the shareholders also read it. I may return to this in future editions of the blog, you might like to see some of the stress and frustration that has been caused me during the last twelve months.

Anyway, enough of that. The van's loaded, hopefully there won't be snowdrifts between me and Buxton tomorrow, 14 901 is due back from the CVR on Thursday: so there should be plenty to see and write about next Sunday. See ya then?