Of that ornamental pond again

24th January 2021

Into all our lives a little rain must fall...

So at the beginning of the week I set about ordering door handles and locks to model numbers Andrew had identified. The handles were due to come from supplier A whereas the actual catches (to be exact, giant size budget locks) from Supplier B. Both A and B are manufacturers and supply the automotive trade - to go through their catalogues is to recognise fittings that went on Land Rovers, Minis and through to buses, coaches and delivery vans, etc. In Yorkshire Engine days I dealt with them both. I spoke first to supplier B, and was given the surprising news that I could not buy direct, but had to go through Supplier A, who was their distributor. This was disappointing, as I had always found B to be the easier supplier to deal with, but dutifully spoke to Supplier A. Well actually, I had already put an enquiry on A for the handles. They have an on-line catalogue but you cannot order from it, only create a 'quote basket' that you then have to e-mail to them. The following day I rang supplier A as they hadn't come back to me, and anyway I wanted to add the items from B. 'Sales' were busy, but eventually rang back and insisted they had quoted me, but when they read out the e-mail address they'd sent it to, it was something else entirely. Could I add these two items (one left hand, one right hand) from Supplier B? Certainly, said the man from Sales, let me check stock... Oh, he says, we don't have any of them in. Our minimum order is 25 off, but if you order 50 we'll give you ..per cent discount. Oh and it will be about 9 weeks lead time. I rather stopped listening. I ordered the handles but passed on ordering 25 times what I needed in the way of catches. Back to Supplier B. I got hold of the lady who had yesterday extolled the virtues of Supplier A. I only want one of each, I explained, but -A- want me to buy 25 of each and wait 9 weeks for them. That's not really much good as a distributor, is it? She agreed, an order was taken, and the catches duly arrived before the handles from Supplier A.

As I said last week, Andrew had booked a day off (in fact it was Wednesday) to collect various things and on Tuesday afternoon I had loaded up a generator, extension cable and a grinder with slitting discs as first port of call was Buxton to collect some pallisade fencing that he'd won on e-bay. It was of course persisting it down and at first the generator didn't want to play, but eventually it burst into life and the panels, which had already been taken off their posts, were cut into suitable sections that would clear (vertically) the doorway of the van. Being 2.4m tall though, they would only fit on the diagonal and soon it was apparent that one back door of the van was going to have to stay partially open. With all secured and our gear re-loaded, we drove casually back down to the shed and emptied it.

After lunch we set off again, this time for Sheffield, as on another auction site (a commercial one) he had won a number of items including a shelf full of taps and tap handles, some oil bunds for storing 25litre or 45 gallon drums and a centrifugal pump for water. Once loaded (and re-soaked) I stopped off at one of my regular suppliers for some hose and fittings, then carried on to the profilers for a large number of profiles which had been put on a pallet and just had to go on top. Back down to the shed to unload, and after all the rain, a glance around the back at the footpath that borders the site.

To recap, regular readers will remember that over the last couple of years there have been repeated instances of the Derwent overflowing down at Darley Bridge, and the adjacent fields flooding with the crossroads a few hundred yards down from the shed becoming impassable. Indeed, down by the bridge itself is a nice public house called the Star and Compasss. I've eaten there in the past and had customers stay there. As if pandemic lockdowns weren't enough, they were flooded out twice before, and had barely re-opened when 'travellers' occupied their camping grounds adjacent. Well, on Wednesday they were inundated again, and I wonder whether they shouldn't rename themselves the 'something and Submarine'. Anyway, irrespective of whether flooding has taken place over at Darley Bridge, whenever heavy rain occurs the footpath by the shed floods to a depth of several inches. We've tried to help: the slot drain at the south end of our shed has been extended so that if it gets high enough, floodwater can find its way through our drain, but further north it tends to build up to the point where it oozes in to the shed and floods into the first depression it finds - what we know as Track 3B, or what we all-too-often have called on this blog, the ornamental pond.

Neither Andrew nor I came in on Thursday, but Friday I went in and sure enough it was 2 inches deep in 3B. But what had Andrew bought only this week? Why, a centrifugal pump for pumping water. It had no pipes, just quick release hydraulic connectors, so I hunted round and found a couple of lengths of 3/4 inch hose and some fittings and got the whole thing set up and plugged in.

Now, the experts amongst you will be jumping up and down and saying I've got this wrong, that it sucks into the centre and delivers out on the top. That's what I thought, and what I first set up. But when I turned the socket on, it didn't pump. I tried a different 110V socket - no better - so turned it off, dug out some tools and took off the motor (fan) cover to see if it was seized. No, it spun freely. So I took off the connector cover on the top to see if the wiring looked OK - and found to my surprise the body of what was obviously a rotary switch that in the dark I had not noticed. Now that I was aware of it I looked closely and found it was marked 1-0-2 and assumed it was wired in some way to give two speeds. So switching the power back on I flipped it to '1' and the water in Track 3B bubbled as it pumped air like the Aero ads on tv at the moment. I turned it back off, swapped inlet and outlet on the connectors and turned it back to '1', whereupon it started draining the track. Later I got cocky and tried speeding it up by changing to '2' only to find that this reversed the motor, but I decided to leave well alone. The problem is that we have no sump in the pit, so you can only draw water down to the level that the pump starts sucking air, and you can't leave it alone to get on with the job, so although I tried to progress with other work I had to keep popping back to see it was OK.

One thing I did do was put together some of the profiles from Wednesday. Here are most of them. In the centre ground are two towers with large holes on the top - these will become the rear engne mounts on a loco, carrying the a/v rubbers that I've been using for the last 25 years or so. These two mount to the frame, above and to the right are two brackets that will be secured to the engine flywheel housing and rest on those rubbers. The towers are merely standing because their parts are interlocking, the two flywheel additions though are not quite right and want a little clean up before they fit properly. At the right hand side is the front bearer that will bolt to matching pads on the underside of the engine- there are two more pieces to go on the underside which will carry the front rubber mounts, and fix to two pads which will straddle the big piece over on the left, which will form a new front cross-stretcher from one frame side to the other. Hopefully sometime soon we'll get them all welded up and the engine installed as it is taking up space on a wagon.

Late on Friday night, well early hours on Saturday really, Andrew was out on brake tests on the main line, he got back about 5.30 Saturday morning and I wasn't expecting him to be around much. I continued pumping 3B until the water was as low as it was going to get, meantime I cracked on with other tasks - the pressure washer, which had a damaged power cable which I had meant to get around to replacing ages and ages ago, finally yielded to a specially acquired Torx driver and now sports a bright orange cable feed. The two fire alarms were bolted to tapped holes in the columns as I'd agreed with Andrew. I brought in one of the four oil drum bunds he'd acquired on Wednesday, just to see how it looked.

I set about removing one of the old cab door locks from Claire (it was a fight), and so on. By the time I came out to head back home it was bitterly cold and I had to scrape ice from both in and outside the windscreen.

We've been back down again today although after disruption to sleep Andrew wasn't firing on all cylinders.(Actually I rather slept in as well and have even less excuse). The space heater has run almost non-stop. I continued work on Claire, completing torque converter oil pipes and carrying on with top and bottom rad connections, although I tried using the suppliers' 'coupling' pieces for the silicon hoses and came to the conclusion that I needed longer ones as the clips could not fit sufficiently far over the 'humps' The piece that goes over the top of the casing front to space it off was gassed to a profile nearer that of the casing top and Andrew fitted the door seal rubber to the other door and took on the job of fitting the new handles etc to the one I'd managed to remove. That is something of an on-the-job development and is still in progress, but once mastered, the other door should be simpler. We did trial one of the new arms on RS8, but the adaptors need drilling out first, but they should work a treat.

And that's about it for the week. No time to tell you about an article in 'Todays Railways' about the line through Millers Dale, whose author niavely argues that the line should be re-instated just because MEMRAP has estimated that each stone train going north before turning south emits 4 tons of CO2. (But as Andrew observed, if the line to Buxton were to be electrified, then the stone trains could go downhill to Buxton and a 92 could take them over the LNW route at passenger train speeds). But as I say, I haven't the time. Instead I wish you all another Covid-free week, clear of flood or snowdrift, and all being well, I'll be back next week - see ya then.