Of being on the move

3rd July 2022

A little bit of everything.

As I said at the end of last week, our plan had been somewhat stymied by paperwork SNAFUs but as I set off to travel south on Monday I began to wonder if the whole week was going to be one big screw up. I'd said to Adam that I'd like to be home Tuesday night (I am no big fan of hotel nights away, especially when it's on my expenses and not an employer's) so he nominated 10.30 at Sheffield Park. I hit the road just after 06.00 thinking four and a half hours ought to be ample, but I had not taken sufficient 'Monday morning' factor into account. Apart from just general volume of traffic, I was delayed about 15 minutes queuing to get on to the M1 south, then some time north of Leicester, then a vehicle fire a bit south of Watford Gap lost me another 30 minutes. It did give me plenty of time though to get on the phone, the result of such hands-free diplomacy being that the kind folk at the East Kent agreed that the loco we were due to bring north on Friday could now be collected Tuesday.

Adam and Ian therefore arrived at about 10.45 with me still doing a mere 25mph on the M25: it was just after noon before I turned into the entrance to the Bluebell Railway station. 'Good, you can help pack away', said Adam as I climbed out the van, somewhat stiff after 6 hours driving with no break. For most of the work had been done, the object of our interest, the USA 0-6-0 tank, being aboard already. I duly started dis-assembling ramp, stowing rails and timbers on the deck, banging my head into one of the USA's cab steps (I can still feel the resulting lump) and getting it ready to depart while Adam and Ian chained it firmly down.

Somewhere along the way I opened the back doors of the van and a kind person forklifted a pallet into it. This carried the torque converter which had been in the Bluebell's Sentinel loco at Horsted Keynes - I had recently supplied an exchange one, plus a kit to convert it to run on hydraulic oil rather than diesel. 'You'll notice that' said the forklifter, indicating the weight as the springs settled slightly. With all the rushing, plus queueing and creeping on the trip down, the mpg had been pretty poor thus far - about 48.6 I think - but the van tends not to care how much you put in it, more how you drive it, though I didn't get into a long discussion.

With the loco loaded I had arranged to leave Ian and Adam to it, as I had some people to see at Horsted Keynes, so I saw the loco away but that was my lot. I see on National Preservation that there has been much speculation as to where it was destined and a suggestion that as it was being moved by me my blog might spill all. Well, sorry to disappoint, but the new owner, be they him, her, corporate or any other politically correct pronoun, has requested that it remains confidential, so you'll have to look elsewhere.

As for me, one of my old acquaintances from filming Murder on the Orient Express had been waiting patiently to show me things up at Horsted Keynes and after that, we went on a tour of the carriage sheds to find Rowan M. It is a little sobering to think back to my first visit to the Bluebell in the mid 1960s. Me and my mate Chris were driven there by Chris's parents. At Sheffield Park there was a big open goods yard and somewhere I have a photo on the GW 4-4-0 Dukedog with Chris in the driver's position, if memory serves with me taking it from the tender  - and no building, nor anyone around. We rode up to Horsted in the LNW observation saloon behind 488. The driver was John Hart, who owned a large 0 gauge indoor/outdoor layout in Surbiton not far from where I lived. He had not been expecting us but came back and found us on arrival at HK and we got a footplate ride on the run round. The Ardingly branch was I think still open and served by electric trains. Now the Ardingly line is gone, and my guide had shown me the hydraulic signalling system they'd developed and how it assists operation when Horsted is "switched out" - no longer the final destination for Bluebell passengers.

Once when I was down this way I innocently thought that heading due east was the sensible course of action - but though I saw a lot of countryside it was a long and slow road and this time I retraced my steps to the M23, and rejoined the M25, stopping at Clacket Lane to sort out a hotel. By late afternoon I was doddling around Dover, nearly ending up on the Docks (I blame poor signposting) and doing a quick recce of the access to Shepherdswell to gauge time for the morning. By 9pm I was in my hotel room, breakfast booked for 07.00 and ready for an early night. Adam and Ian meanwhile had reached to Clacket Lane, and we arranged an 09.00 start.

Tuesday morning. I needn't have been quite that early for breakfast, but whatever I was up and out and round to Shepherdswell by 08.30. My initial contact who had re-arranged things was actually on holiday in Antigua but had given me an additional local contact which was fortunate as he had inadvertantly given me the wrong number for the gate padlock! So I rang the local man (Mark) and was given the correct number which caused a hare running as Mark then phoned Tony (who was already on site) to tell him the lorry was here! My role, wherever possible is to get there first and so ensure that everything runs smoothly - the access road here is narrow but surprisingly busy and you don't want a large low loader sitting there blocking it. Thus as Tony pushed the Thomas Hill around with an 08, he found just me with the van (bit small for a 35ton 0-4-0 to fit in).

I glanced at my watch - 08.50 - and told him they'd be here about nine and within 2 minutes the vehicle rolled in and turned straight off the B road to line up over the tracks. Tony kindly went off and produced some teas, we set to work and assembled the ramp rails and drew the loco on board. Once loaded and ready to depart, it was time to block the B road. It was too tight to back out and turn to head out the way Adam had come in, but equally it is not allowed to proceed west through Shepherdswell.The compromise is to back out, go about 50 yards and turn into a side turn, then back out and complete a 3-pointer to head back east.

Both Tony and Mark assisted by holding up traffic. The low loader had turned into the side road and was about to reverse out when a Range Rover came up from Shepherdswell, Tony signalled him to stop, the driver waved back as if to say, 'it's all right, I'm just going up here' put his indicator on and turned - to realise why Tony had tried to stop him. Even a Range Rover is no match for the back end of a King low loader - a bigger lorry has tried and it still bears the scar. One rather embarrassed Range Rover driver backed out of its way. By the time it was turned and the steering reset to automatic, we had quite a few cars and vans waiting and bidding our East Kent friends farewell, I followed the low loader to Eythorne, amused as motorists squeezed to the sides or backed up as the low loaded loco bore down on them.

I left them to it at that point, as we were leaving the loco on the lorry until Thursday when we would drop it off at Worksop. On my reaching home incidentally, despite the poor mpg on the run south and the weight of the torque converter since then, overall the van returned 52.3 over some 570 miles. Wednesday was a day of recovery and paperwork, starting with a call from Trader Support Services to check how things had gone. I have a customer in Northern Ireland, and the protocol has complicated things. Pre-Brexit I could just send my goods, now I must go through several online forms to get a 'Movement Refrence Number' (MRN - which to me always stood for 'Model Railway News' but I'm showing my age again) issued for it. I had been lead to understand that all I needed was an EORI from HMRC but nothing so simple, and after wading through 'helpful' information on gov.uk (which was so full of jargon and assumptions about the reader's familiarity with proceedures as to be totally incomprehensible) I had registered for TSS and when I hit a snag (part way through Form No.1) put a request in for guidance. An extremely helpful guy called me up, and over the following few days had taken me through what I needed to do, what I still needed and where to fill it all in. This was his final call, as his screen apparently didn't reveal that I had submitted the completed data and actually got my MRN. If only I can remember what to do next time - if Boris hasn't rehashed the whole thing in the interim.

Thursday, and although we'd said 08.00 traffic delayed me a few minutes and Adam and Ian were early, so were part assembled by the time I arrived. We discharged our loco but had some delay getting the tractor and trailer re-assembled owing to the confined space and it was about 09.20 when we set off for Barrow Hill. I thought I had time to spare - a loaded vehicle has to go eastward out of Worksop and to get to Barrow Hill go north, then back down the M18 to reach the M1. But Adam was empty and had other ideas, so to my astonishment I came up behind them at Staveley and followed them the last couple of miles. The loco had been sat waiting since the previous evening, and other than getting the gates unlocked the loading went smoothly, so smoothly in fact that we were backing out just over an hour later.

I went on ahead and drew the keys at Long Marston, estimating that Adam would roll up about 14.00, and so it was, and we lined up on the loading pad just as the clouds opted to rain. This loco incidentally, featured in this blog not long ago, when we brought it from Ferrybridge to Barrow Hill - it has lost its 'Dairy Milk' chocolate box livery for Porterbrook blue.

The weather had little effect though and we were away in just over the hour. Again the van was putting up a good effort and I was hoping to maintain 53.2, but traffic delays around Leicester and Alfreton dragged it down to 52.6 by the time I reached home.

On Friday I had sit-down meeting with Adam as he is about to go off on holiday and the next couple of weeks jobs will be just Phil and me. Plus I could get to inspect the 'new' King (T2) and measure up for rails and brackets to get it earning a £ or two.

Saturday, and with Matt H I was back at tbe shed. I set Matt on to make up a Woodruff key and get the clutch arm fitted to the Hudswell 0-4-0, then the key for the pulley that will drive the compressor. Meanwhile I hid in the HaTRAMM. When we select the systems to power up the crane, the engine ramps up to 1500rpm and stays there, which is noisy for both operator and bystander and unneccessary if you stop to re-rig the load or some other delay. But that's how the system works and Andy M, who was on holiday in Viking country, had corresponded with me on e-mail about how to provide a 'ramp down' override for such occasions. His suggestion was to put a switch in series with the coil for a particular relay - I had had several other ways in mind but his looked simpler and I had a spare switch assembly to hand. The only problem was to identify the relay among a bank of about thirty. Some kind soul had gone along with a marker pen writing the refrence number on each relay but the beauty of interchangeable relays is that you can interchange them, whereupon the number in marker pen is somewhat misleading. For such occasions you check the wire numbers connected to the base and my 'K43' clearly wasn't so in reality. Eventually I found it masquerading as K19 (and no, they were never in numerical sequence) and after belling through with a test meter, inserted my new switch and ran two wires from control panel to relay, carefully numbering them '36' and '36R'.

And does it all work? Dunno, haven't had time to test it. Andrew had borrowed the van that morning and gone off to the Yorkshire Wolds Rly with a quantity of point rodding bits and returned with a compressor. In the afternoon we installed the front casing top to the Hudswell and brought the rear section in from outside. A couple of passers by on the footpath caught my attention and I invited them for the tour - apparently they had got off the Peak Rail train to try and get a closer look but hadn't expected to get 'in'. I had to make sure I finished in time that they caught a later service back to Rowsley.

Sunday and I was down first thing to make sure the shed was open for Tony S to carry on with work on his railcar. I had a propshaft to clean up plus a rubber strip to cut and punch ready to form the joint between casing top and cab front. The casing section was lowered on to the casing side bearers and 'slid' into place before bolting up.

Andrew suddenly suggested an alternative location to mount the air cleaner, which after trying brackets and determining clearances needed I adopted and got the mounting brackets located and the aperture for the pre-cleaner marked out for Andrew to plasma cut one evening this week. (A lot of industrial locomotives draw their combustion air from inside the casings as their engines were bought with air cleaners already assembled. This is actually frowned on today as the air temperature rises within the casings and affects combustion. Later Hudswells, like Grace had their pre-cleaners outside with flexible hoses back to the air cleaner in its original position.)

Andrew has been trying to re-arrange some of the racking within the container - one of the large, sturdy racks we made years ago was due to be emptied and move to the cement van, while not-so-sturdy-but-with-more-shelves commercial racking took its place. It's been on his jobs list for several weeks and we broke off, indeed Tony S asisted, to lift out the old racking and assemble its replacement. Late in the afternoon we drew the train forward so that the forklift could empty that compressor from the van and pick up the sturdy racking from where we had staggered out of the container with it and for now put it in the main shed. The cement van itself needs a bit of tidying first to make space for it, with Jagger's C6 shedding bits from its presence in the turnover stand. Tony incidentally was making progress on electricals today and we were briefly serenaded by wiper and starter motors indicating that bringing the Perkins back to life may not be long in the future.

And that's about it for this week. I've got month end to wrap up tomorrow then it's me and Phil G out with the low loader for 3 days. What are we up to? Come back next week and find out. See ya then.