Of Chesterfield a'calling

17th March 2024

Ah Chesterfield, where you can spend a week one day.

First though: great news! UKLocos have decided that there is actually only one 1972 Mitsubishi loco numbered DL34 at Darley Dale, and that it is a 2ft 6 gauge BoBo diesel mechanical. It seems cruel of me to continue ridiculing them, but come on, how can you have a BoBo DM? 'Bo-Bo is the UIC indication of a wheel arrangement for railway vehicles with four axles in two individual bogies, all driven by their own traction motors.' (Wikipedia - but other definitions are available). Answer: you can't. You could have a B-B DM (though I suppose it would technically be a B+B DM) but as DL34 is diesel hydraulic and has side rods...

I was down at the shed Monday afternoon progressing on the 'BoBoDM' when Bagnall the Barclay came by with a Peak Rail works train, and looking very much the part. I would probably have appreciated it more had I not been suffering pain in the left side of my mouth. I should have spent another evening down there with Andrew but having not been able to eat all that much I didn't feel up to it.

Tuesday, and having slept little I concluded it was time to ring the dentist. I got an appointment for 11.45 but with the van smoking I accepted an offer from Steph to drop me off a little earlier, with the proviso that she couldn't wait around and she'd collect me from Chesterfield somewhere after 2 - get myself there by bus. (Our old Sheffield NHS Dentist, having sent out emails during Covid saying 'don't come in to surgery unless you're in pain' then used the period when they hadn't seen us to strike us off their lists. Our new NHS Dentist is the other side of Chesterfield, but actually a trifle closer than the old!). So he saw me a little early, identified the primary cause of pain and put in a temporary filling, with a fresh appointment early next month to finish the work.

I came out and seeing no buses around and feeling that a gentle stroll would do me good, I set off for Chesterfield on foot, some 4 miles or so away and two hours to do it in. I was nearly half way there and still hadn't seen a bus pass me, and climbing a short but not especially steep hill, when I began to feel very tired. Just before the summit there was a bus stop so I turned into the shelter and rested my bum on what passes for a seat. Steph had texted so I sent a reply, but felt very sleepy and shakey. I remember wishing I was at home, tucked up in bed, and - What am I doing on the floor? My phone was a few feet away, I picked it up and was trying to make sense of things when a passing 4x4 stopped and the driver asked if I was OK? Despite my reassurance he insisted on calling an ambulance, especially after showing me that I had a cut on the top of my head and blood dribbling down by neck (regular readers will know that I dislike the sight of blood, especially when it is (a) mine and (b) leaking). He'd seen me 'collapse' as he drove by, turned around and returned. Meanwhile I was sweating furiously and apparently had steam coming off me.

I rang Steph, she rushed through her remaining commitments and dashed over, arriving before the ambulance (I rang and cancelled it) and took me home to the Country Pile. (My kind motorist, who drives a cement lorry for Breedon, had had to leave but only after seeing me much better and shaking hands.) She washed the cut on my noggin (about 40mm long, presumably from my head encountering the bus shelter bum rest on the way down) and I thought no more about it. It was merely a combination of fatigue, lack of food and drink and maybe interraction with the vestiges of the anaesthetic at the Dentist's. Then Andrew got home.

'You're going to A&E' he said, and rang Dr Ben for moral support. After tea we set off for the local Whitworth Hospital (that great man again) which has a Minor Injuries Department. I felt a fraud explaining things to the Receptionist. She advised that all they'd do was delay me two hours waiting and then refer me to Chesterfield A&E, so I'd be better going there myself. Andrew took me on to Chesterfield, where Dr Ben works and lives nearby, so he left me and had an evening with Dr Ben and two other prominent PRA personalities.

Now this story has gone on long enough. If I felt a fraud explaining what had happened at the little Whitworth, I felt even more so at the bigger A&E with 60-80 people waiting. During the course of the next 5 hours though I had a CT scan of my head, an ECG, a chest X-ray, gave 2 blood samples (I think, I had my eyes shut) and had my blood pressure taken 4 times. The conclusion - nothing untoward. It was probably a combination of fatigue, lack of food and drink and maybe interraction with the vestiges of the anaesthetic...

Wednesday - I had brake blocks to collect from a foundry plus Andrew had bought some bits from two auction houses. One was hand tool stuff but the other included a fork-lift tipping skip. Quite what size this was wasn't clear from the photos, so I thought it prudent to measure it first in case it was too big for the van, which had meanwhile had a bit of TLC to reduce the smoking. When I got there it turned out to be the size smaller than Andrew had thought, so it slid in easily and I got to the shed at about 4pm, where Jagger and friends were breaking up the concrete from the old PR gas bottle store. Thus the skip was slid out of the van, pirouetted round, dragged to the side and filled with n an hour of my arrival.

Apparently Andrew is convinced that we can remove that old box van without compromising the site boundary security, and thus get the container in its place early on, though the old gas bottle store was in the way. It isn't now. I told Jagger that Andrew had a plan as to where to put the arisings, as he nearly always does. Turns out he hasn't.

A further trip in to Sheffield on Thursday and a bit more paperwork on Friday and I was all ready for the weekend. Andrew was bringing young W again and Andy H was back and a long list of jobs on DL34 to be finished. I have a thing about drive belts. I know there are formulae to give you the correct belt length for any application, but they start with the presumption that you know the PCD for the pulleys at both ends. All too often I do not know one end because it's the pulley that is already on the loco, and may have been specially machined for the job. It's hard enough being confident on its maxima and minima when it may not have been machined to the relevant BS or European standards. Plus there's my tendency to err on the higher side if faced with two possible solutions. In the case of DL34 I had two new belt drives. The hydraulic pump (where I did know both pulley sizes but erred on the long side) and the compressor drive where something went completely wrong and I was a long way short. Fortunately this was obvious early in the week and by Friday some more suitable belts had arrived and the wrong ones consigned to our ever expanding selection of 'try these for size..'.

I seem to have spent a chunk of my weekend kneeling on the cab floor treadplates (ouch) paying homage to the wiring box and associated bits. But is cabled in, its DIL switches are set and all I should have to do is set its zero and span functions.

Late Saturday afternoon the Hatramm was fired up and delicately lifted the casing top back off the container and lowered it on to the loco top, after which it was bolted back down and first thing this morning I re-assembled the 'duct' (I use inverted commas as this tube is mightily heavy just to carry air at slightly lower than atmospheric pressure: it has a 4mm wall thickness. Any thicker and I'd classify it as a ballast weight) between air cleaners and turbo.

I was part way through a lunchtime sandwich as the train rolled by. A man at one carriage door window shouted to me could he look around? I said yes without thinking how busy I was. I saw him detrain at Darley Dale down platform and two minutes later I was giving him the tour as Andrew arrived.

The final length of 1.5 inch tube bought for the job of being the vacuum train pipe got promoted to a main air feed pipe for the new compressor. The hydraulic motor was finally connected up to the exhauster. The vac control valve received the 3 small bore connections. Andrew made up a natty looking bracket to carry the balancing regulator and adjacent the additional little reservoir to buffer the pressure into the valve.

Late this afternoon we filled the hydraulic reservoir with oil, topped up the exhauster, reconnected the batteries and turned on the power. The low air pressure alarm blasted through the cab. In a last minute tweak, I had added a power indication to the interface enclosure and this lit up. Engine oil and coolant were OK. It was the moment of truth. I turned the key to crank and there was a sort of anti-climactic groan as the engine tried to turn but all the electrics went off.

We tried again and again. We had after all been charging the batteries a week or so ago but they refused to take much charge and when our new sophisticated battery tester was switched on, it declared each one 'weak' or 'bad'. It might just be a dodgy battery contact, but it wasn't that instantaneous burst of silence that you get with that, when it won't pass high currents. This was more like a half second of depressed, neurotic battery that can't be a****d. This was 17.30 tonight. If the engine had fired we'd have stuck on a bit longer and endeavoured to get the first part of the system set up (after which Andrew would have wished me luck with the electronic stuff and headed off) but as it is a slave set will have to be charged up and hooked in.

I have been starting this report of late with a moan about the increased repair costs to the trailer and the time it has been taking. You'll notice nothing has been said about it this week - and that's because I've heard nothing. The new drums were due late in the week and I'm sure Heanors would love their yard space back but it hasn't returned to me and time is getting tight. Meanwhile there's an amusing report of certain other hauliers allegedly upping their prices because 'Briddon's off the road'. Shock, horror! This whole charade started on the premise that there was a market for loco movements that were suited to a more modest trailer than the big tackle that goes with shifting 80 to 100 tons. I've been at it four years now and I think the case has been proven, just need to get over this little glitch in service!

And that's about it. No time to tell you that Andrew and I are pretty much determined to get the 03 back in action for the Twin Peaks Gala. (Oh maybe I just did).Will the trailer come back? Will we get DL34 to start up and will all that fancy electronics work first time (if only).? For that and other non-exploding bombshells I'll be back next week. See ya then.