Of islands and birds

25th October 2020

There's a satirical comment doing the rounds: above a smiling Michael Portillo, it says ' this week on Great British Train Journeys, I'll retrace the journey from London to Scotland made by Margaret Ferrier and interview some of those she infected along the way.'

I was writing to my sister a day or so ago. She retired to Guernsey from her post as a High Court Judge a few years ago and is thus living on an island which is largely (I believe) Covid-free (virus's - virii?- cannot afford to live there and anyway don't possess the residency qualifications) surrounded by areas which are ravaged by said infection - France and England to name but two. As I wrote, it struck me that Darley Dale is in much the same situation, surrounded by areas in higher Teirs of lockdown - Manchester and Lancashire, Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire, even Stoke on Trent - but still free to carry on at something resembling normality. I greet you therefore, from the green and pleasant lands of the Derbyshire Dales where men are men and the buffalo still roam free, where an overweight woman with blue-dyed hair can walk past a queue outside the chip shop and be the third person inside when the sign clearly says only 2 in at a time.

Oh, yeah, so what's been happening this week. Once again commercial work has taken precedence, but not entirely. I had visitors on Tuesday and just my luck, the locomotive they had come to inspect developed a problem so I had a fitter come in on Thursday to diagnose and rectify. I was able to leave him to it and get some work done on Claire, which is long overdue. I kept hearing bird song, which is not unusual, and fluttering of wings, but whilst this too is not unusual, I had this feeling that they were beating inside the shed, and sure enough, a movement out the corner of my eye turned out to be a Tit flitting from roof beam to roof beam.

I have nothing against birds - I am no twitcher, and I still haven't got around to putting up those nest boxes made from ex BAOR loco lamp housings - except for the old saying that a bird in the hand craps on your wrist, or in this case, birds taking up residence in our shed would guano-dash the locos. We have had first hand experience before - once or twice we have come to 14 901 to find that some poor sparrow has found its way in to the cab, but its beak-nav hasn't been up to finding its way out again. The unfortunate feathered friend would be dead on the floor, but in its distress, first emptied its bowels over ther control desk. It takes more than a squirt of Cillit Bang to restore order. Concerned that once again birds were getting into the shed somewhere (and I haven't given them a key) it is presumably some small open aperture in the eaves, like the one that provides me an unwelcome cold draft when I'm drinking a regailing cup of tea in winter.

Anyway, for some time I watched this thing apparently exploring, wondering whether it was restless because it saw us as a threat to its new winter shelter. It was mid afternoon before it finally occured to me that like those that have entered a loco cab, it was scared of being trapped in, and so at last I wound up one of the roller shutters, moved away from it and in seconds saw the tit depart the shed in full flight.

Friday night Andrew commandeered me to drive up to Bakewell: he had agreed to buy 4 mini-stillages. The vendor has used them in handling scaffold boards, Andrew plans to cut'n'carve them to carry engines or converters for storage or transit. (On Sunday a volunteer saw them and said they were like ones he'd seen on tv recycling programmes where people make tables out of them.)

Saturday started off quite bright but turned to wet and windy, so work was confined within the shed, and whilst I plodded on with wiring on Claire, Andrew addressed an issue around the front left steps.

The step design on these Hudswells is I consider one of the best, better even than my former employers' and a design I am trying to emulate when we get back on to Adolf. But the lower and second steps bolt from the front buffer beam to a diaphragm plate about an inch thick, and since before Claire came into Andrew's possession, the lower half of this plate had been bent back, presumably a souvenir of some long-past derailment. When recently we took the side skirts off, it transpired that only that skirt was still holding them and so off they came as they were a danger to stand on. The diaphragm plate is about an inch thick, and taking it off the loco is out of the question, so he had rigged up a chain arrangement to put tension on it and on Saturday started warming it up.

The gas torch he is using is not a cutting torch but a special 'pepper pot' type designed to warm areas up without being too specific. With the tension and the periodic pause with the heat while a sledgehammer delicately explained to the plate what was expected of it, it gradually went back to somewhere near its original form. It will never be perfect, but with the damaged steps repaired and some packers for the gaps, they should be restored and secure once again.

Today I had a set of brake blocks to change, but Andrew had set himself the task of starting to organise the 20ft container, intended to be the new home for the Terrypicker which continues to take up space in the main shed. But the container has various things from a lifting beam, through numerous heavy loco bits to the spare chains and binders bought for use with the low loader. He had checked on Saturday that the pallet racking he had bought sme months ago was just within the width of the container, as he intended to erect some at the back so that a lot of bits currently on the floor could take up residence there in a greater density. Currently there is a cupboard and filing cabinet in there which, not being in too bad a condition, may come into the main shed, the cupboard at least could augment our over-subscribed paint store.

Once again a picture is hardly of much interest, but he was satisfied with progress and we continue to tidy-up the shed and its environs while pressing on with general work. Anyway, not much else to report. So I'll wish you all a Covid-free week and hope you'll come back again next time. See ya then.