A trip to (the) LMS

Thursday's day away at LMS.

This was nothing to do with the London Midland & Scottish, but a working day on 76077 at Locomotive Maintenance Services Ltd in Loughborough. Readers will recall that this is where our Standard's frames are at the moment, where they are being worked on by this contractor until - well, until we run out of funds. We're OK at the moment.

 

 

The loco is now close to re-wheeling. GWSR volunteers are invited to attend and help (by appointment) to save on costs, and there were 3 of us on site on Thursday.

Our jobs were to fill / rub down the frames, and to clean and paint the drivers.

 

 

The wheels were already shotblasted at Toddington, but minor deterioration needed attending to, as well as the cleaning out of these pockets, which are designed to be filled with lead to act as counterweights.

In our view this is not a good design, as only some of the spaces are used, and the unused ones fill up with water. But that was what the Standards had.

 

 

Ian here is filling and rubbing down the frames. Although the engine had only a short life, some pitting has taken place due to years of storage outside. A common complaint, but we want our loco to look good.

This is a picture of the inside of the frames. The black bit is a completely new, large rear drag box, already fitted.

Curious are the lower frame stretchers, which look mobile as they are secured by pins and not the rivets you might expect. Again, a standard feature.

The 76077 project is being handled by LMS at this stage so that it doesn't take another 30 years before the loco is ready, so some professional help has been sought. But combined with volunteer input. 

Most recently the funding effort has been on parts sponsorship, which has gone well. On this link you can see what has already been sponsored - like the two worksplates - and what is still open:

https://standard76077.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/FULL-Phase-1-list-showing-sponsors-2.pdf

 

Here for example is one of the new worksplates.

Yes, 1956! The loco is not that old, so it is in a sound, basic condition.

One item that is still well short of its sponsorship requirement target is the £10.500 reverser gearbox. We mentioned this in our last update, when 14 out of the 75 parts needed had been sponsored. This has now risen to 22, almost a third.

Below is a cutting from the parts list that you can download:

The story is that this reverser was still on the loco at Barry until a parts stripper took it out without Dai Woodham's permission (we heard). Luckily he was stopped at the gate and the reverser was retrieved. Unfortunately Woodhams was not a parts warehouse but a scrapyard, so the reverser was not reinstalled on the loco, but eventually went for scrap as well. It has proved impossible to find a replacement, so a new build is our only option. We have had some help from another project with some patterns, but the expensive part is the cutting of the bevel gears and screws. So that comes to £10.500 in total, which we hope to raise from 75 sponsors at £140 each.

If you want to help we'd love to hear from you. Please do help. You can get all the details from the Toddington Standard website: https://standard76077.com/support-76077

Let's see if the number of sponsored shares has gone up next time.

Saturday, banging away at that unloading road

Why do we go back for more punishment? Why, oh why?

Because the loco dept. keep trundling the class 45 over it, and then all is ruined again.

So here we go again, for another day's hand tamping.

At the gate at Winchcombe we had been left a gift. And Merry Christmas to you too, that dog walker.

Then we went to chose our weapons of war.

Fed up with shovel packing, we selected larger calibre guns from the armoury, to wit, these four Kangos.

A day earlier, Neal and yours truly volunteered to repair the compressed air pipe that runs from the loco shed to the workshop. The troughs and their lids had been smashed by the mini digger excavating the trackbed.

Our planned replacement of the troughs was put into the 'too difficult' box as we were reluctant to bury the pipe permanently in concrete, where it could never be reached again, and it was already showing some signs of corrosion. To be looked at again at a later date.

On the apron outside the shed the loco dept. had dressed 3 locomotives for Santa Special duty. Which two would be used on Saturday?

Has it moved any yet?

Then we set to work. Just 5 of us today, but enough to do the job. Due to advancing years the PWay department has lost several stalwart members over the last year or so, and we could do with some new blood. Fancy joining us?

Good exercise, better than sitting at home with a cactus and looking out of the window. A sense of humour is essential.

The first job was to remove a kink, which had mysteriously appeared at the southern end. Well, it wasn't there last week, has somebody got a supply of them?

With the kink, er, un-kinked, we got out the 4 Kangos, so that soon there would be 4 of us rattling away with one each. We fired up the first one and rattled away, the fired up the second, and both stopped.

It then appeared that we were overtaxing the shed's circuits, and had to reduce our kango-ing plans by 75%.

While Chris rattled away, the rest of us were reduced to doing the packing by hand, using beaters.

The ground immediately below the track was very spongy, and this water appeared out of it after a few packing blows with the beater. Not what you want to see under a section of track that should never move again.

Eventually Steve managed to get us hooked up to two different circuits, so that we could carry on with two Kango hammers.

Just before lunch, working from the south, we were almost done, with one more joint to go. The kink in the foreground is also out, and the curve looks fine now.

During our packing activities Santa services continued, and here is 4270 caught about mid-day while running round its train. It was a lovely sunny day, unlike an awful rainy Sunday which followed.

 

During the day the frames of 2807 were very gingerly pulled out of the shed on the new boiler trolleys and put over the pit.

The white clouds are not steam, but from a high powered pressure washer. Looked impressive though!

 

 

After a pleasant lunch sitting in the sun in the doorway to the shed we finished off packing the last joint. It was agreed not to lift the section nearest the car park by too much, as during a future northern shed extension this area would also have to be lowered to be 30mm below the (extended) shed floor. So there is now a bit of a ramp up to the car park level.

Then it was time to call the 'steamroller' again, aka our 'friend' the class 45.

It was propelled through the site by the 03, backwards and forwards twice. We watched anxiously for any movement, and there was some at the car park end.

The class 45 will never shift it now....

The road held steady and the kink stayed away, but the end nearest the camera, where the track rises to meet the car park, still showed some deflection under the Peak's mighty weight.

As you can see from the picture, we had confidently already put all the tools away, so the heavy Kangos were hauled back off the Landie and we gave the last 5 meters another go. The Peak waited in the background, ready to pounce.

After another round of Kango packing the Peak was trundled over the track again, but still more movement in the same spot was detected.

As we were now tired and it was starting to get dark, we decided that a last packing effort would be made by the next gang. Fingers crossed!

Before leaving Toddington we took this picture of Foremarke Hall returning in the lovely evening light.

Tuesday on the canopy completion

Back to work on that canopy end for Broadway! We had a good day fabricating today. Having made the two boxes for the bottoms of the post (to make them look like castings) we cut 8 pieces of steel strip today, and shaped them to fit the tops of the two boxes. It's new ground, we've never done anything like this before, so there was a bit of experimenting, but we did good.

Here is Neal grinding down one of the 8 pieces to give it a slanted end.

We didn't much like the result though, it wasn't smooth enough. In a great spirit of collaboration workshop manager Steve of the 35006 group offered to trim them for us on a shaping machine in his workshop.

It took a little while to set up (the vice has to be mounted at an angle a precise distance away from the cutting head) but eventually all was ready and in a couple of hours all 8 pieces had an angle cut down both sides.

Here Steve is watching the first cut. No need to worry though, Steve, it was right first time!

This was the result, one of the bars with two sides cut at an angle. One end is already cut to shape, the other still needs a 45 degree cut as well.

As we cut the 8 pieces, we took them over to our working area in the loco shed one by one, and Neal started to fit them around the box.

The upright is not the actual column, but an offcut of it. It was used so the whole thing could stand on a work bench, while Neal cut and filed everything to size and shape, ready for final welding.

Here is the first box finished, at the end of the day. All 4 junction pieces are cut to shape, welded in and then ground down.

This is a trial fit of the first box on one of the actual columns. Just to the left of it is a piece of half round that will be fixed just above it, to emulate what the original casting looked like at that point. The bottom end will be below ground, and as the box is not load bearing we only made it for the area that will be in view.

The whole column will, when finished, be sent for galvanising, so that it won't be able to rust, particularly in the vulnerable area where it emerges from the ground.

Wednesday on the PWay gang.

Wet-wet-wet. No matter, we are the tough gang! Well, if we say it loud enough, it might become true.

 

 

Here we are, braving the rain. Well, why brave it out in the open, when you can brave it in the dry under the canopy?  It would be silly not to.

We're getting a briefing from Robert, and having a few sly doughnuts as we listen.

 

That little clump of men in the distance on the right is our valiant C&M department. They're filling in a crack that has appeared behind the platforms slabs on P2. One group is raking out the old tarmac, the other is heating up the new one to fill in the crack.

The PWay gang has no nice warming fire, so set out to expose itself to wind and rain on an embankment at Little Buckland. We split into two groups. One to put on some blind fishplates on a number of welds that have been identified as needing to be re-done, the other to continue moving sleepers around about 25 welded joints, where the rail has crept and the weld is too close to a sleeper.

The doughnuts and mince pies were thrown carelessly into the back of the Landie, together with the rest of the tools. In a way they are tools as well, we need them to be able to do our work. Perhaps we can get the railway to pay for them then? Er, no.... dream on!

 

We did one joint in the morning, which meant digging out and jacking along 4 sleepers. If we're lucky we need to move only 3 sleepers, but not this time.

Then we walked on to the next one. We have a list, and are working our way down it to Stanton Fields.

 

The next one turned out to be a bit more challenging still, as 5 sleepers had been marked for moving.

On the left you can see the 5 arrows that tell us the destinations for each sleeper. Usually the welds are opposite each other, but the reason for the quintuple move was that here the welds were slightly off set and had managed to position themselves on opposite sides of the same sleeper - see the two red arrows in the picture on the right. That meant moving the sleeper quite a long way, and all the nearby ones to suit and keep the spacing about equal.

We caught a pretty heavy shower at this point (and so did the doughnuts and mince pies thrown carelessly into the back of the Landie) so having moved a total of 9 sleepers today, and with more threatening clouds on the horizon, there was general agreement to call it a day.

Derek's nostalgia from 1963

A popular vision at the moment is the HST painted in Midland Pullman colours, so how about Derek's photograph of the real thing? Here it is:

Blue Pullman passing Foxhall Junction, just west of Didcot, heading for Paddington on 28 March 1963. Foxhall Junction is where the south to west curve from Oxford joins the main line. A westbound train that was switching from the relief line to the main line came to grief here when going too fast in 1967, and O.S. Nock was on board as a passenger and described the experience. He estimated that the train passed through Didcot station at 70-75 mph and he did not feel any brake application.

 

5380 Mogul on a northbound lengthy freight passing Hinksey on 02 April 1963.

This 43xx Mogul is getting on a bit here. It was released into traffic in 1920, still going and earning its keep in 1963 and only finally withdrawn in September of the same year at the age of 43 years. It was cut into little pieces by Cashmores of Newport in Wales.

75022 Standard Class 4 with a freight heading towards Oxford on the line from Bicester on 02 April 1963. The double track on the left is the link via Stratfield Brake which connects the Bicester and Worcester routes just north of Wolvercote Junction. Keep watching the blog and a after a few more episodes Jo may put up an image of a freight on this link.

This Riddles Standard was built at Swindon at the end of 1953 and started its service life at Cardiff Canton. Over its 12 year service life it roamed around quite a bit, but always in the general area of the South West, until it was withdrawn at Worcester at the end of 1965.  It was scrapped by T.W. Ward.

4964 Rodwell Hall takes the slow line at Wolvercote Junction on a southbound freight from the Banbury direction, leaving the main line clear for the train from Worcester. 02 April 1963. 

This 33 year year old GWR locomotive had only 4 shed allocations during its busy service life. It started, like the Standard 4 above, at Cardiff Canton but in 1928, and finished at Pontypool Road at the end of 1963.

Rodwell Hall the building was a C19th mansion erected at Trowbridge in Gothic renaissance style. It is still there, grade 2 listed, and according to some articles, fighting off housing development of its gardens. Let's hope it manages to fight them off.

7928 Wolf Hall on a Worcester to Paddington train passing Wolvercote Junction. 02 April 1963. 

Wolf Hall was a Modified Hall built in 1950. It started work at Worcester, but no further shed allocations are known. It was withdrawn in 1965 after a relatively short 14 year life.

Wolf Hall the building is a C17th manor house near Burbage in Wiltshire, close to the Kennet and Avon canal. It's actually called Wulfhall, and an earlier manor house on the same site was the seat of the Seymour family, Jane Seymour being one of Henry VIII's 6 wives. The name became the inspiration to Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall. The house is still there, but divided into flats today.

 

A Western Diesel Hydraulic with an up express passing Saunderton on 09 April 1963. Just visible in the distance is a DMU on the down line. 

 Derek feels that this was actually the Cambrian Coast Express - does anyone know more?

Free money for the railway!

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