Of a Christmas Carol

20th December 2020

Bah, humbug. Is it that time of year already?

So here we are at the last issue of Weekend Rails before Christmas. Normally time to be full of nostalgia and contentment as we look forward to the annual festivities. Perhaps a little bit of a review of the year and a gentle winding down as nobody in business seems to want to make decisions or place orders so close to the year end.

Well, I certainly haven't been winding down much this year, in fact I did a quick add up and found that this week (Monday to Saturday) I have driven just under 1600 miles, and 85% of it on business. On Monday for example, I met up with the low loader to collect another gronk in the dark, and as we were about to set off, a final exam of the trailer revealed that one tyre had been punctured. It was of course an inside tyre (the trailer has 12 tyres, mounted in pairs) and although we were able to lift the  axle off the ground (it is amazing what you can do to the trailer with some blocks of wood and changing the air suspension/hydraulic settings) the wheelnuts were not ones that we've had off before so they had to wait for a tyre fitter to come out and change the wheel with a windy-gun. (The tyre fortunately was repairable: fortunately as they cost summat like £300 each).

We offloaded the following morning and reloaded another loco to drop off later that day, then rounded the tour off by collecting a loco out of the north east on Wednesday.

On Thursday I went down to London, and on Friday morning headed over to Glossop. Now that was an interesting visit. In an innocuous industrial unit not far off the A57, with a ginormous Rolls-Royce jet engine sat outside and what looks like a small rocket or maybe a bomb, was a vast collection of jet engines and associated paraphenalia. No, this is not another mad Briddon scheme, nor preparation for an April 1st spoof. The firm deals in ex MoD kit. My contact pointed to a row of small engines, about the size of an industrial space heater, and explained that there were two of them in every Lynx helicopter, and that they produced 1250hp each. Anyway, amongst the lots of bits he acquired were a number of 3kW 24V Bosch motors, some with hydraulic pumps fitted, some without. I ended up buying one with a pump, (with an eye to upgrading the hydraulics on the low loader) and two without pumps for a small loco project that I've had in mind. But then plans Andrew had had to collect grandson on Friday afternoon went sour and I volunteered to go get him, which at least gave me the comparative comfort of his Golf for 6 hours rather than the van.

And that brings me around to the dumbest saga of the week. There are times when you get your mind set on one particular track and despite mounting evidence to the contrary, you pursue that avenue without regard for any alternatives. For some weeks now, there has been a 'beep,beep,beep,beep,beep' sound in our hall roughly every minute. After a while we tended not to notice, but grandson's hearing is more acute and we had been meaning to sort it out before he came to us for Christmas. The only thing electronic in the hall is the burglar alarm, and it seemed that the bleeps were coming from the loudspeaker box on the wall. I got it in my head that this was a low battery warning from the back-up battery inside the alarm electronics box, so earlier this week I opened the box (with Steph on duty to re-set when the tamper circuit tripped) and identified the battery, ordering one to arrive on Friday.

While I was away collecting grandson, Steph set up the Christmas tree in the hall, and when I got back the bleeping bleeps were much louder, and even sticking cardboard and cloth over the alarm speaker didn't seem to make much difference. But once the idea is in your head, you don't question your diagnosis. This morning I duly opened the alarm box again and changed the battery (not too early, we didn't want to annoy the neighbours) with Andrew on standby to re-set. And voila! - er -the bleeping bleeps continued unabated. This was something of a setback, but there's nothing you can't find out on line somewhere, isn't there? We consulted the diagrams and found the terminals for the hall speaker and detached one wire. It made no difference. I detached the other - still no effect. Andrew was now convinced that there must be a back-up battery in the speaker box and this was making the bleeps. Once you get an idea in your head, etc... I decided that maybe the best thing to do was to shutdown the alarm altogether, by removing the in-line fuse and detaching the internal battery. OK, this was not my best thinking, as the external alarm went into overdrive and anyone not already awake in Darley Dale surely were thereafter: especially as we had to repower the electronics and wait for it to re-boot itself before it would respond to the re-set code. It seemed an awfully long time - Merry Christmas neighbours. The bleeps incidentally never so much as paused during this.

Despite the fact that we had detached the wires from the hall loudspeaker at the control box end, the bleeping still seemed to be coming from the former so we unclipped its enclosure. It had no internal battery. 'Snip the wires' said Andrew. I couldn't see the point, the wires were dead, I'd detached them at the other end, but after trying to unsolder them (and finding I couldn't) I dutifully snipped them from the speaker. At this point, with the speaker in its box now free in our hands, it became apparent that the bleeping bleeps were not coming from this box at all. Sat on top of some cardboard boxes in front of us was an old Carbon monoxide alarm that relocated to the Briddon Country Pile when we moved out of Briddon Towers (Sheffield) and was never mounted anywhere as the smoke alarm was more than effective. A 'low battery' LED on it glimmered dimly. I opened it up and removed the 2 AA batteries. Silence now reigns at the Briddon Country Pile.

The moral, as these tales must always support such appendices, is to stop and take stock every now and again. Work out where you have got to, and whether the evidence still supports your initial premise. Be ready to amend your plan in the light of more complete information. And not just on electronics, any activity you perform in life benefits from a pause and a dispassionate review, whether it's troubleshooting a pneumatic system through to marketing a heritage railway. Don't close your mind to other solutions.

And though it may not be to the standard of Dickens' Christmas Carol, I'll leave it there, wish you all the very best Christmas you can get under the circumstances, and hope that 2021 will see us in much better cheer. I'll be doing something during the week and hopefully back next Sunday. See ya then.