Of 2hap reunited

11th December 2022

Fourteen days to Christmas.

We'd arranged to be at Rowsley at 08.00 Monday morning so I was a bit taken aback to be rung up at 07.25 by Adam to ask what the gate code was.

In the days of the earlier Peak Rail administration we had to keep quiet about knowing the current gate code as Mrs Statham allegedly told people that we - well me in particular - were 'personna non grata' at Rowsley notwithstanding that we were PRA members, I was a shareholder in PR plc and we held an agreement that she had signed granting us a right to operate between Darley Dale and Rowsley. It became a matter of pride that we knew the current gate codes and from time to time would make clandestine excursions around the yard, studiously avoiding the CCTV cameras, to check that various items of ours that could not be collected and recovered to Darley Dale were still intact and unmolested.

But with the new relaxed attitude, the return to providing a works loco at Rowsley (which the old 'Board' had terminated for no apparent benefit other than (I assume) being able to go around saying that 'Peak Rail got nothing in return' for our occupation of Darley Dale) we haven't had the need and the last code number I had was 5 digits but the current lock only had 4. I hurriedly made ready to dash down but when I got there someone else had come by and let them in and they were starting to set up. Several weeks ago we divorced the 2HAP as the first carriage left the railway for a new owner and the second had been placed on the headshunt adjacent ready to follow. But the faithful DAF had suffered a gearbox problem and by the time it had been repaired, Adam had a backlog of work, both mine and his, for it to complete and the dates didn't tie up with the new owners availability to receive it.

Finally last week the moons and tides coincided and as an added impetus, Adam wanted to get there and back before the winter snows started as the destination was some way to the north. I had been told late last week that the Sentinel was low on transmission oil but was disconcerted to learn that it wasn't so much 'low' as 'out', so Andrew Civil suggested he shunt the coach across with E1, and passed me the token so that I could walk up and unlock the lever frame. The coach was duly brought up to the Doll and winched aboard.

The DAF and swan neck re-attached, and after a turn round, Adam and Ian set off. That night they paused at Hamilton Services (M74) and the following day unloaded near Aberdeen as snow clouds formed over the mountains. The 2HAP is thus reunited and has boldly gone where no 2HAP - for that matter not a lot in Network South East livery - has gone before.

Once they were on the road I popped back to the Sentinel and poured in what transmission oil I'd brought, which at least restored base pressure and thus drive) and said I pop back with more later in the week (which it occurs to me tonight I haven't). After a break back home I was on the road again. One of the commercial auctions Andrew monitors had been that of an engineering firm near Gainsborough closing down, and he had bought two small angle grinders, one 9inch angle grinder, a large breast drill and a plate cam-lock for a modest amount but had meetings etc so had not the time to collect. So off I went and after Gainsborough headed southwards toward Newark.

In so doing I passed a pub at Torksey - the Hume Arms - which I stopped at two or three times a dozen or so years ago but seemingly had been a victim of the relentless 'cheap supermarket booze' scourge that has forced so many hostelries out of business. It was boarded up and overgrown, and it may have been my reflecting on the contrast of past pleasant memories and the present day reality that meant I missed my turn and realised only when I was on the A57 heading to Lincoln. A quick right hander and some cross-country village hopping brought me back to where I needed to be, if a little tardy.

Andrew had won a quantity of Whitworth & BSF nuts and bolts on ebay - well to be exact no-one else had bid, and he had passed me two crisp ten pound notes to pay the seller. I found the house and after a few minutes establishing contact, he took me to an outhouse whose shelves were stacked with long thin open-topped carboard boxes labelled with the contents. I hadn't really comprehended just how much there was: if I had I might have brought a sack truck or something, but the vendor offered the use of his wheelbarrow and it took 4 trips to transfer them to the van. Along the way he told me he'd 'sold' them on ebay once before - for £100 - but the buyer who was down Warwick way, then declared that on reflection it wasn't worth his while coming so far and could they meet half way, suggesting a location that was about 40 miles for him but 80 for my storyteller, who had scrubbed the sale entirely. He was anxious to know that they were going to a good home, perhaps, given he had 'lost' £80 on the deal, that I wasn't about to package them up and market them at stupendous profits. Poor signal meant I couldn't show him Weekend Rails on my phone, but having explained our 'hobby' he revealed he was also events organiser for a car-owners group so we may yet see him again at the head of a gaggle of classic 60s something cars next year.

Unloading this lot at Darley Dale has further overwhelmed our nut and bolt storage system, already heaving after the arrival of all the metric stuff from Manchester a couple of weeks before. Despite my extolling the virtues of BSW and BSF so many times here in the past, our stocks have been miniscule in comparison with the metric selections we have amassed, and aside from one racking section dedicated to BSF bolts (after I cleared out a collection of BSF bolts from someone's garage in Sheffield) we had no formal locations on the wall to keep them and what we had (that we knew we had, i.e. identified in bags or boxes) lived on the floor for lack of anywhere better. Rather more of the floor has had to be allocated to them, and will have to have our attention 'ere long to tidy up.

On Wednesday the van went back in for a wheel bearing to be changed. With over 113,000 miles on its clock (I bought it at 14,000) and having had to change one in August, I put it down to simple wear and tear and was not overly surprised when bearing noise started up again almost immediately after the last one: I just assumed another was on its way. It had not become as bad as August (in that I didn't have to drive with the radio on loud to cover the whine) but as the Matlock garage had a ten day lead time on repairs (making them slightly easier to get an appointment with than our local GP surgery) I had booked it in as a precaution. Ironically it turned out this bearing was the same as last time (nearside front) so was treated as warranty anyway.

With paperwork and such taking up my time Thursday and Friday it was Saturday before we assembled at the shed once again, with Andrew 'on call' for East Mids, so arriving late after a 2a.m. disturbance to his slumbers. As usual I had a list of jobs to try to get through for the weekend, and if we did achieve roughly 50% of them, I did also put through some extras that I hadn't anticipated being able to achieve. None of them are especially photogenic so my apologies to those of you who are fascinated by 'bits of engineering wot we do' that there a no pictures to break up what may otherwise appear something of a list. The weather outside was cold, but not so cold on Saturday as it had been on Friday, so Matt was tasked with extracting one of the silencers on Alstom's loco for attention. When I built this loco up 22 years ago I used a pair of Canadian-made spiral silencers as they saved much space when compared to traditional cylindrical ones. But one had split open where we had added a mounting bracket and its adjacent pipe clips had corroded through so it had to come off for repair. That aside though, we concentrated on work indoors, where Andy M was given free reign and a large fuse holder to re-arrange the cabling on one end of the Janus loco to release the defective voltage reg and reconfigure the wiring to suit an alternator (a Prestolite one is now in stock but bracketry for which is still in the early stages of design).

We had an unexpected visitor - well, unexpected for me as Andrew had forgotten to warn me he was coming - after a box of bits promised to the Severn Valley and having identified them I did the usual tour. My usual tale of the class 14 brought forth a lot of questions, as of course the 14 in its present form has the engine that was once in B end of Class 17 D8587, and the SVR has a Class 17 (a wandering one, but nominally that's its home).. He was aware of the R-R powered duo of 17s but had no informaion on their BR service, what did I know? This was not a question I was clued up to answer. I know they had an engine failure - attributed to oil contamination if I recall correctly - and I have read, years ago, some reports indicating some service hours the engines had accrued, but other than they had not, apparently, caught fire as often as the Paxmans I knew little to assauge his curiousity. (Apparently it was not unusual for the Paxman engines to catch fire, usually from spilt oils or fuels, and for an extinguisher to be emptied into the engine compartment while the locomotive, and the engine, continued to work. Our visitor spoke highly of the well-designed and built Clayton loco, but less so of thePaxman power unit.).

After the tour, we warmed ourselves with a tea and Andrew arrived, he and the visitor exchanging notes on people they'd both known in working on the railways. On the EE work continued to prepare it for operation again. Capacity reservoirs manufactured last week were mounted, pipes given additional securings. Hoses re-routed and by Sunday afternoon we had started filling the hydraulic oil reservoir (having cut an access hole above the filler cap for convenience and installed a little flap to cover it) and started static air testing and fixing a few air leaks that made themselves known. Although not yet set up with vacuum, the air valve that pilots the vac brake control can be heard to operate and by gut feel the valve operator has been adjusted to be somewhere near the range of operation we expect and stops set up to prevent over-travel.

Sunday was howver a deal colder than Saturday, and snow had fallen overnight. During the early afternoon I checked my kerosene supply - oops none - but we fired up the space heater on what was still in its tank. With a building like ours, the hot air of course rises way above us (I once had a unit in Rotherham where if you ran the gas space heater all day, as you were about to go home at 5pm the warm air reached your head level) and if only we could lift the locos 10 foot or so it would become quite pleasant quite quickly to work on them. Fortunately the insulation in the shed means that it is normally 4 or 5 degrees above the outside air temperature anyway, save around the roller shutter doors which of course form large heat transfer panels with the cold outside air.

On the Hudswell Matt fitted the new composite brake blocks on their carriers and set the rigging up, and then moved on to the casing doors where several seized hinges had to be ground or gassed off and replaced with new. Andy M later went under and refitted the horncheck ties we had had to remove in order to gain sufficient space to wangle the engine sump back in, then nipped all the sump bolts in to place. In between directing the work in hand and making tea, I managed to do a bit of tidying, including allocating some spare trays to become repositories for BSW and BSF Nuts (that's about 10 cardboard trays less but hasn't really dented the pile all that much). Amongst the incisive topics discussed over tea this weekend has been the importance of always having your TLAs to hand and how and when to act upon a SEP..   

It's off to Manchester tomorrow, unless the snow is piled high overnight, as the supplier, when I intimated I'd be over to collect on Friday - said better not as they'd be closing early for their Christmas party. Apparently I don't warrant an invitation. Ah well. A plan for Wednesday is being re-jigged to make best use of Andrew's day off after Plan 'A' was put on hold by someone's cataracts. Beyond that I have no clue as to what's in store. So as usual, you'll have to come back and read about it. See ya then.

Eh? Oh -- TLA - Three letter acronym. SEP - Someone else's problem.