Of a battery of tasks

4th April 2021

Late on Monday afternoon Adam arrived to collect the trailer: I'd have liked more time but it was the only day he had a tractor free (getting in and out requires one with a better turning circle than the Merc) so Monday it had to be. During the day I had painted the spare wheel stand (as it now is) black over Sunday afternoon's primer and attempted, unsuccesfully, to get the Lister to crank momentarily, or to be exact, momentarily each time I pressed the button. I couldn't run it with the pump attached (and detaching the pump would have taken too much time up) but the starter refused to function at all bar two miniscule tries. Yet I could measure voltage all the way through. Of course, I assumed that I must have incorrectly wired my extension cables, but despite checking, double and triple checking, and finally removing the conector strip and bullet-crimping the cables together, I could get no life. So other than adding some steel bars over the axles (no longer occupied by the spare wheels) nothing much else got done. When I packed the usual gear into the van for the next transport job, I added a Lister starting handle, just in case!

I have been authorised, rather, instructed, to tell you all that we had planned to stage an April Fools' stunt, to the effect that we had bought the Avonside 0-6-0ST from the moribund Elsecar railway and were planning to convert it to 0-6-0DH with new superstructure to be a big brother to RS8, numbering it RS12 (RS8 x 1.5). Fortunately perhaps, we have been too busy to contemplate how to put it out at the right time.

Indeed, the 1st of April was a busy day as I had agreed to a customer's request to get not one but two gronks shifted on the same day. It didn't start auspiciously: for reasons I won't go in to we had been directed to collect them from a location that was actually about 3 miles from where they were, (not an April Fools' merely loose terminology) but never mind, after staring at padlocked gates we made a few phone calls and ascertained where we should be! From then on it was a race against time, in part to complete the job before Adam ran out of driving hours.

By 09.30 the first loco was on its way: we got to its destination by noon, offloaded and were setting off by 1pm, back at the collection point by 2.30, the second being loaded and on its way around 4pm. It reached its new home by 5.45, but we were getting a bit tired, and the unloading arrangements required a lot of reversing to get into position and the right way round to suit the customer, so it was nearly 7.30 by the time the empty trailer was heading back to base.

Oh, did the Lister start OK? Well, after my initial self-doubt it had occurred to me that what I had witnessed could be bad battery connections - the lack of charge warning light (I think the bulb's gone) might have offered more clue. So before I set off I had cleaned and vaselined the battery terminals (the battery comes home with me and the cable lugs are held on by wing nuts) and hey presto it functioned normally, and the ability to ramp the throttle up and down from the new throttle control being especially effective. The next 2-3 weeks are looking busy for the trailer: with various locos, both steam and diesel, and rolling stock to be moved.

Friday I spent the day in the workshops, trying to recover after the tiring previous day. Claire was cranked over in the morning with the stop solenoid electrically disconnected so it couldn't run: the idea being to ensure that the engine had oil circulation before anything else. During the afternoon the solenoid was re-connected and Claire came to life for the first time in months, certainly a first for the new wiring, but not so good when I tried to stop it (which is the first test I aim for after first starting - no point in finding a serious problem a few minutes in and then discovering that you can't stop the blithering thing!) as it went on running, but pulling out the battery master switch at least had the right effect. Consulting the diagram brought home to me the significance of another issue - some of the LED indicators in the cab were lighting up before the keyswitch was turned on, but their negative connections were commoned through that keyswitch, so how were they doing so?. I even opened up the panel and removed the common return from the 4 LEDs, yet the 2 which illuminated before continued to shine brightly. So I set about tracing where they were finding a route back to -ve. One course was through the AVR: no problem there, taking its neg back 'downstream' of the keyswitch posed no problem. In fact, it transpired that the LEDs were finding a route through the Run relay coil, sufficient to hold the relay in (but not enough to have pulled it over) and hence keep the engine running. Temporarily disconnecting this dimmed but did not extinguish the LEDs, so I looked a little further and found another route through the coil of the valve that operates the automatic lubricator. Detaching this put out the LEDs until the keyswitch went on, as it should be. I decided to hunt out some diodes and return to it Saturday morning. As a relief I then got it into my head to change the batteries on Charlie. Ever since the charge circuit issues last year (which seemed to sort themselves out) Charlie has been running on RS8's batteries sat on the cab floor as its original batteries were still occupying the battery compartment. I decided it was high time to return them to RS8 and brought out a pair of batteries I'd replaced on a customer's loco last autumn which were supposed to be servicable (and indicated on the battery tester that they ought to be). I fitted these and ended up making a new cable link to connect the two together, employing the new sack truck to wheel the old ones and RS8's back to shed.

First thing Saturday morning I had a trip up to the shotblasters, but after a while headed down to the shed with a bag of diodes, soldering one into the feed to the run relay on Claire cured that problem, but another in the line to the lubricator coil had no effect, so for now I've left it detached. Meanwhile Andrew, who was 'Engineer on call' that day for East Mids' went out to attend a failed 158 in the Hope Valley where an engine had suffered a catastrophic failure. Having got the line cleared and the damaged power unit secured, the set was despatched at low speed to Derby. Once he did get to join me we carried out a number of tasks including sorting through the remaining parts from the 0-6-0 Fowler's erstwhile engine to ascertain what was aluminium and what ferrous. Jagger had also arrived and was also keen to progress the cement van floor, but although a few more of the old boards could be extracted, a pallet of compressors needed the forklift and it was too late to proceed that day.

Sunday was not an early a start as it should have been. In order to lift the pallet from the cement van, we needed to shunt the train a bit and anyway, if I was to drive Claire more than 6ft I needed space outside the shed. So we came to start Charlie - and the batteries I had fitted on Friday turned out to be too flat to work. I had however had Charlie's previous set on charge Saturday afternoon so we swapped them back on - to find they still weren't up to it either. In desperation Andrew went and came back with 14 901's old ones, which are the biggest batteries we use (too large in fact to fit in the battery compartment) and at last Charlie could be started. Thus after all that, RS8's batteries are available to go back on it but I still can't replace the battery compartment door on Charlie.

With the cement van in better position another batch of worn/warped floorboards were removed, and from under, about a wheelbarrow-full of cement dust and associated detritus. Andrew got the gas out and chopped the bolts that held the edge strips at the doorways (there to protect the plank ends) and cleared the area for rubbing down and priming - which may even have been achieved after this shot was taken.

While the forklift was outside Charlie was used to bring down the 0-6-0 Fowler, and the casing top (which we brought down from the container last week in order to extract the silencer) was dropped back into place, the better to protect the Rolls' engine we fitted not so long ago (and take up less space than sat on the ground).

Charlie then brought Claire outside and retired to a safe distance. Claire was fired up and proceeded to run up and down without significant problems (though I do have a few electrical and other snags to deal with) and there'll be more testing over the next few days.

Peak Rail had some good news this week, with the award of £114k from the Cultural recovery fund, the application supported by the PRA. The money comes as an initial grant of 50%, the balance only as you prove that you have used it on the projects specified it was to be applied to. Also the first copy of Peak Express to appear in about a year was published.

Back to the shed tomorrow and probably Wednesday, and out with the trailer later in the week. I suppose it keeps me off the streets. Come back this time next week to see if I've managed to achieve anything meaningful, or just the usual. See ya then.