Of changed arrangements

22nd November 2020

Military dictum: No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Well things haven't gone as I foresaw this time last week. For starters, Heanor's workload suddenly picked up so they had no spare tractor to bring the low loader back to Darley and no one to drive it anyway. And by Wednesday when the new winch rope arrived, I was getting bookings for more loco moves so any ideas we had of getting some mods done went out the window. Indeed what with some design work on an export job and the usual sorting of nitty gritty bits for stuff in the shed, plus transitioning to a new software package in order to 'make tax digital' I haven't had as much time in the shed this week as I would have liked. We did though get in for an evening when Andrew had a frustrating time drilling the running plates on Claire to repostion the radiator. In the end he resorted to coring it out but has had to order a tool with a longer reach to get all the way through.

Come the weekend (and daylight, if not particularly hospitable weather), part of the grand tidy-up continued and Ludwig moved everything up from track 1 so that the forklift could trundle around the far end. For some time now there has been an untidy collection of things sat outside the grey container, from miscellaneous stillages to two pallets of bits removed from the low loader to save tare weight. With a bit of jiggery pokery the Terrypicker was wangled out of the shed (anyone who has visited us within the last 18months will know that would have been seemingly impossible) and after the low loader residue had been stacked down the back, the Terrypicker was slid in. Andrew insisted he had measured it but the clearance to the doorway was to say the least 'close'.

This sudden release of floor space triggered off more frenzied re-arrangements. A cabinet that had come in from the container found its way to become No.2 paint cabinet, instead of having a varied collection of tins sat on the floor. This did though involve re-locating the grit blast cabinet to the adjacent wall but Andrew declared he is not entirely satisfied with its position. Meanwhile No.2 polstore, which has been balanced precariously in the middle of the floor since it arrived months ago, was allocated a location on the north wall where one of 3 original workbenches had always resided.

For now this, complete with contents, has been dumped almost in the middle of the workshop, but Andrew's plan is to make it into a pipe threading bench, using a spare pipe vice at one side and the motorised threading machine at the other. (This has been a resident of the floor up to now and kneeling down to operate it can be tiresome.) Not that it was all 'go' of course, and we were able to extend the offer of a socially-distanced cup of tea to an S&T volunteer toiling in the undergrowth at the south of the yard.

Today has been a more productive day (in locomotive terms) with pipes being formed, wires being connected., conduit run out, holes drilled and tapped, etc., etc., but nothing very photogenic.

There have been 3 deaths that have come to my ears this week that are worth recording. The first may not be known to you unless you are also into modelling, and particularly n.g.modelling, where the name of Roy Link will probably strike a chord. I never met Roy (though I recall a brief correspondance years ago,) but his numerous locomotive drawings are to be found in books and magazines, distinctive in the way he added a certain amount of shading to an otherwise exquisite 2D drawing to make machine 'come-alive' on the page. The second was Keiron Thorogood, the energetic agent for Morris Lubricants, who tore around the country promoting Morris' oils and sharing news and gossip from far flung railways. I was only thinking on Friday that we hadn't heard from him for a while when the news came through that he had died in his sleep.

And just as I was about to start writing tonight's edition, came a text that Lawrence Crossan had died. Lawrence was working at 'The Plant' (Doncaster) in the 90s but broke out to set up Locotec. Locotec later teamed up with John Hummel's Rail Management Services to become RMS Locotec. It was Lawrence who, after Barclays Bank forced me to liquidate Yorkshire Engine Company in 2001, started ringing me up and eventually persuaded me to bring my expertise to RMS, then in Dewsbury. At the time John had taken himself off to Okehampton to oversee the reactivation of the privately owned branch to Meldon back into a heritage railway (it was later a community railway but the term hadn't been coined then). So Lawrence had control not only of the hire locomotive business but also the track maintenance/relayals that he insisted 'made all the money' - though that was possibly his way of making sure I didn't ask for a pay rise! Later, after RMS had been bought by the ECT group (ECT being Ealing Community Transport) he perhaps didn't get on with the new management styles - was it the north-south divide? - and left after the move to Wakefield. It was once said that he intended to make enough money out of Locotec to retire to a villa in the south of France, but in the end all he had was a caravan in Cleethorpes. The departure from this world of people we know should remind us to value those we do, especially at a time when our opportunities to enjoy their company may be limited.

The official statement came out from Peak Rail at the beginning of this week that their planned Santa trains have been scrubbed, despite having made the neccessary arrangements that merited that big green 'Covid-safe' tick on the website page. Volunteers are currently barred from Rowsley other than periodic 'security checks'. We shall see whether the end of 'Lockdown 2' as it has been dubbed affords any relaxation. It is ironic - or prescient - that one plc Director was quoted three months ago as thinking that there would be 'no more trains until next Easter' - this blog suggested last May that we could write 2020 off altogether, and several heritage lines already had.

Ah well, what have I to look forward to this week? Get the winch ropes swapped, and the trailer ready to move a couple more of those b****y gronks. Carry on with commercial work in between, order bits and bobs... more of the usual. But feel free to come by and check next week, Same time, same website. See ya then.