Of goodbye to 2024

29th December 2024

It is I suppose customary, that I ought to spend this edition looking back over 2024 and excitedly previewing 2025.

But I really can't be bothered.

December is an annoying month, as I put it to someone on an email recently, half the businesses are trying to get a month's work out in three weeks and the other half has already given up and gone into hibernation. Either way you can't seem to obtain sensible responses to enquiries nor deliveries in ordinary time. Anyway. The year has come to an end with my time split between 3 projects. The re-wiring of the loco for Davis is proceeding steadily. I've almost finished in the desk area aside from identifying and re-connecting various oily and dirty wires that come out in a cats cradle from the bottom of the switch unit to wherever they are supposed to be connected (and there's quite a few 'new' bits added that I can't make sense of straight away): if there were wires to the front headlight then there's no visible remains, etc. The front belt drives and radiator connections need sorting and there we do not appear to have any hoses from the engine to the cab radiators and I rather think the crews will expect them to be there.

Outside on the big minilok, Andrew and I spent most of a day going through the wiring to the throttle control. In manual control this is through a 3 position foot pedal, and I had had reports before the loco was laid up that occasionally it wouldn't 'throttle down' but I hadn't then found anything amiss. This foot control isn't like you car. Rather it is a 3 position pedal - press fully down and the 'throttle increase' line goes live, lift the pedal to half way and the 'throttle increase' line goes dead so the throttle stays wherever it has got to, and if you release the pedal the 'throttle down' line goes live. In radio control the same thing happens from a switch on the transmitter but we're nowhere near that yet. Anyway, the signals to go up or down come through 3 wires to the clever electronics bit, the third wire being a return path, so in theory I should be able to identify which 2 lines have any life when the 'down' signal is on and as the meter tells me whether polarity is correct or incorrect, I should be able to deduce which was the return and therefore identify the individual up or downs.

Except all the meter told me was that I had about 0.9 to 1.6Volts instead of the 24-ish and Andrew pressing the pedal to bottom or midway seemed to make no difference. The circuit diagram though has both the manual and radio control inputs actually controlling two relays - what stops them interfering with one another is that the footpedal 24Volt supply turns off in radio control, and conversely, in manual the radio receiver relays won't change. That doesn't explain though why they need to go through additional relays just to provide a low current signal to the ramp generator.

Anyway, we set about checking that the relays were working, and that they had power to them. These are little cube relays beloved of the automotive market and if you hold your finger on them you can feel them judder as they operate. The throttle down relay though was not working every time and caused Andrew to remove the footpedal assembly from the floor. Inside are two snap action limit switches made by a very reputable german manufacturer and which are commonly used in the rail industry. (Which means they are substantially engineered, very rugged and cost several times more than elsewhere.) But the throttle down one, didn't really snap properly as its spring appeared to be lacking in 'go'. Here then was the defect reported several years ago, sometimes then (and more frequently now after several years parked up) the switch wasn't changing over as it should. The switches are of course, to be found on ebay and there is where we'll order some once the frustrating holiday season is over.

But it didn't explain the lack of power to the signal wires I was monitoring on the meter. We could find 24volts at the relays, but none at the wire ends and for that matter, couldn't prove continuity. For that day it was as far as we could go. After Christmas I hunted out a spare joystick switch but having no luck with that, dug out a 3 position rotary switch and contact sets from the stores and fitted them up in a spare enclosure. After misguided notions of taking the 24volt feed and return up into the minilok cab, it occurred to me that it would be much easier to take them from the module enclosure, though in the end I had to re-cable this a bit and it isn't quite as tidy as it was before and might be re-made before I install it permanently.

I had finished all this on Friday morning and although I wanted a second pair of eyes to be present I crossed fingers, hooked it up and got ready to test. The initial results were disappointing, nothing appeared to happen. With the aid of the meter I could see the input voltage ramp up and down though so after a few adjustments to the amplifier unit I could get the servo arm moving and with the engine running, it would accelerate and decelerate in response to the switch. The control for now is a little sensitive and I may need to make some further adjustments to ramp generator or amplifier, but it works although Andrew could smell hot rubber and it sounds as through the alternator is screaching. For now I've unplugged it all and once the footpedal switch is renewed, will reconnect it directly to see how it behaves.

You might have expected, after all the time taken to get it here, that I would have been attacking the little minilok now that I have an Engine Control unit (ECU) for it. That I haven't is partly down to weather and partly to other priorities. For starters, this minilok is now about to receive its third ECU. This is the second generation unit rather than the first it has had before, so it would be tempting to conclude that this incorporates improvements in the light of experience and is therefore more rugged. But I don't want to risk this, particularly after Andy M dug into his memory and emailed that on Plasser units with the same engine/ECU, P&T incorporated a seperate relay in the feed to the stop solenoid, rather than stop the engine as Deutz appear to envisage by simply cutting off the power to the ECU (when of course, the alternator will still be turning and could create spike issues).

So first jobs are to introduce a Battery Isolation switch and a relay in the stop solenoid line, and re-route the ECU supply and keyswitch accordingly. With this in mind I have spent some time assessing where to install a BIS and what backetry will be needed and although I did break into the stop solenoid connections a decade ago (when the ECU first went down and I niavely thought I could put 24V on it there and get it to go) quite where to put the relay and trace where the feed cable from the keyswitch can be intercepted is still on the list. Besides, the Deutz-man said we'd 'discuss' the wiring issues later and I don't want to do anything that might invalidate his warranty.

I got down at about half-ten today and was plodding away in the Barclay's cab when Andrew arrived. He wanted to do some re-arrangement of things within the ferry van so Louise drew the rake forward until the van's door was just outside the shed shutters and the forklift and a pallet truck were utilised lifting stillages and pallets out of and back into the ferry van plus moving them within. We had an audience throughout, a robin seemed very interested, even hopping under pallets and flying just inside the van or onto stillages just outside while looking us over. It even landed on the top of the forklift exhaust pipe a few times (not when it was running) and seemed unpeturbed by heat or soot deposits.

By 4.15 we had the external floodlights on and were wrapping things up. The floor space inside the ferry van is now more fully occupied, a number of smaller things have been taken inside the container and there is (although the uninitiated might not know it) more space outside, notably as the spare generator for Des is now under cover. I might get another day in on Tuesday but Wednesday is January 1st, the railway is running and, if we get confirmation tomorrow, the BG may be taken back up to Rowsley for departure. At least it might be something worth photographing which you'll gather this week hasn't really provided.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that Bill Hyde has spent many hours trying to make the archive of Weekend Rails accessible. For those of you who have tried before, it's been changed entirely and several years of the archive are now fully available. I spent an hour or two myself yesterday re-reading my entries from 10 or 12 years ago. It was also remiss of me to have overlooked something I meant to mention in last week's edition. You may recall in my write-up for the Peak Rail plc AGM in October that one Director was re-elected based on all the proxy votes cast in his favour but did himself little favour in response to questions at the meeting. Curiously a certain ex-Director (having been directed to this blog) rang up Mark Sealey wanting to know more about the circumstances. Anyway, the aforementioned Director, despite being re-elected, is recorded at Companies House of having resigned on December 6th = another of the 'Statham-era' has severed their links.

And that about wraps things up for 2024. I'll be back in a fresh, bright new year called 2025. See ya then.