Of returning to a new normal

14th June 2020

There seems to be a rumour about that heritage railways will re-start on or after June 27th. Has Cummings agreed?

.Welcome back to yet another edition. Before I begin, I have an important announcement. Do you wear an appropriate facemask? Do you wear prescription spectacles? Then you may be eligible for condensation.

Actually, humour aside. Andrew tells me that the average number of passengers on a main line Sheffield to/from London service is now up to 13. Even that's a significant improvement from the average of 8 that was the norm only a few weeks ago. Notwithstanding the crowd reported a week or two ago at Quorn when GCR ran a test train, whether a re-opened heritage railway is certain to attract a significant number of paying punters is surely nothing but wishful thinking. Yes, compartment stock offers the possibility of a defined space for a family group, but side corridor vehicles mean that access to them is through a narrow aperture with plenty of close-up surfaces for accidental transmission.

The Appleby Frodingham group over at Scunthorpe have arrived at a formula where they plan to run a train of 4 brake vans, which provides therefore 8 balconies, with one reserved for the 'Guard' leaving 7 to be hired by cohabiting groups or bubbled-up households with an appropriate donation. They've announced the first revised service on the 27th. This I learned from Jagger as he arrived on Friday as we extend the hand of friendship once again, even if it's appropriately gloved and masked.

So what's been happening this week? Andrew and I have been down several evenings, plodding on with various projects, some commercial. We got the drive adaptor mounted on the Lister LV2 No.2, planned to go on to the Hatramm, and with the pump and its mounting loosely fitted on the back, determined the spacer needed to go between the male gear recently mounted on the pump and the female drive gear which had just arrived from an e-bay supplier. I've since drawn this adaptor up and it will go on my next profile order, but I just put one through this week with bits for the trailer and Claire.

Andrew was mounting a compressor base on one loco and then drilling the base having lined up the pulley/belts. Unfortunately one hole was too close to a support underneath to accept a nut underside, so he set about tapping the hole out M12 but the tap broke. He tried gripping the jagged bits sticking up but these disintegrated. I only mention this because we're going to see if we can plasma cut the remaining bit of tap out at the centre without damaging the thread it had cut thus far. I'll let you know how we get on.

Peak Rail ran a test train this week, well, I've also been told it was a track inspection. Five carriages with D8 at the Matlock end and the class 25 at the other came through Darley Dale twice each way around lunch time on Tuesday: we weren't there but our trusty security cameras did not let us down. And talking of which, a further investment started this week to upgrade the cameras and recorder. We put these up in 2016 and though they were good at the time, the price of the technology for better ones has tumbled since, and they are said to use less electricity. Not that they are expensive to run, but the spiders remain attracted to their warmth so if the new cameras which arrived late this week are cooler, we might get a less hassle from the arachnoids: de-webbing the cameras is a pain.

And on the subject of wildlife, our Tit family appears to have moved out. Although I was concerned that a predator had got the babies, watching from the van a few days later showed that no, parents were still busy feeding, but it looks like the babies have now flown and the Ferry van buffer is again empty.

Ludwig Mond has not seen much use of late. Ever since it came to us, there has been a switch in the desk which operated the standstill protection relay. Er what? Well, to prevent you sitting still with the power on and cooking the traction motors, there is a timer which knocks out the contactors (with a bang and a flash) after so many seconds unless the system 'knows' you're moving. A box of electronics is mounted under the cab floor and receives the motion signals from a sensor, and converts this into minimal movement detection (i.e. we are not standing still), overspeed movement detection (i.e. if we go much faster the traction motors are liable to start flying apart) and an analogue output for the speedo. But the standing still end of the electronics had not worked for years, and someone installed a switch that parallelled the contacts in the electronics box to make the loco work. Well, a few weeks ago I bit the bullet, detached the electronics box complete and sent it over to a friend of mine, whose initial observations about the state of the outside of the box (it's mounted in the same area where steel pipework has corroded through and aluminium bodied air valves have developed fresh 'oles) questioned whether GEC knew what they were doing. But internally it had survived, and he went through a test schedule, but initially couldn't get the standstill output to function. I am lead to understand that someone else had got this far and the new switch had been the solution when he or she still couldn't make it work. But my man is made of sterner stuff, and eventually found an output transistor one of whose 3 wires was fractured.

So the box came back maybe 3 weeks ago, and initially I just connected it up as before (standstill wire detached) and checked everything else was working. I was hesitant about reconnecting that last wire. Firstly because it did not seem as though it wanted to reach the connection it should, and secondly because there were additional external wires and a capacitor that were not shown on the GEC literature. What if these mods should compromise the arrangement and reconnecting would cause further damage?

It was irrational though and a week or 10 days ago I reconnected. But then Ludwig didn't have any reason to move. Until Saturday. Andrew and I had had a long mid-day meeting with our haulier about use of the trailer and forthcoming jobs and we got down to the shed during the afternoon with the plan of relocating 31 concrete sleepers ready for despatch. Ludwig had to draw the locos out the way and the standstill relay functioned as it should, but you needed to be at about 2.5mph to make it happen, and that's a little fast for positioning locos or wagons in specific places. Still it does work and that's the important thing The sleepers were duly extricated and put ready on firmer ground, and the locos replaced.

Today in Jagger's footsteps came Phil G, who with Andrew made a valiant attempt to extricate the steering rams from the trailer. One has shown signs of weeping slightly, so both are due to come out for overhaul, as we bring the trailer up to tip-top condition. But the pivot pins have refused to budge and we will have to come up with an alternative solution to extract them. Still on the topic of the trailer the clamps arrived from the USA on Saturday. (At this rate San Diego to Darley Dale will have been quicker than the Wolverhampton to Darley Dale transit of the steel I've ordered to make new drag bars.)

Later on the forklift was in action again, recovering a stillage from the PCV: this vehicle will have to be emptied soon as we are not far from putting its original bogies back under with new wheels and bearings. Indeed, we are drawing up a job list with a view to having a crane in again shortly to reposition various things, including emptying the two conflats, Thelma and Louise, which may be leaving us.

And that's about it for the week. Sad news from Scotland, where Brush Barclay has been closed down by Wabtec in considerable haste. As someone said only last night, we can expect a round of redundancies when all this is over. Thank goodness I'm a self-employed pensioner, who'll be back next week. See ya then.