Thank you for all the well spirited comments following last week’s April fool, it was nice for the readership numbers to (temporarily at least) return to pre-Covid levels. This week, in contrast, has been a short week due to Easter and lower levels of volunteers with grandchildren being off and holidays being had!
London North Eastern Railway 1950 Brake Corridor Third E1866 (GOLD)
The woodwork associated with the servery area is being painted up.
British Railways 1961 Brake First Open (Kitchen) M14021 (GOLD)
The slowly advancing negotiations with the asbestos removal contractor regrettably has fallen through and they no longer wish to undertake the work. We have now returned to the drawing board and are now exploring a new batch of contractors.
British Railways 1958 Brake Corridor Second M35148 (SILVER)
Work continues to focus on the wheelchair accessible saloon, but not in a particularly photogenic way. Further metalwork has been tidied up and more small areas replaced and painted around the four window apertures and work is also ongoing on tackling the doorway edges on the double (former luggage) doors. Some of these are having the wooden frames removed, others can remain in situ. The rough aluminium weather strips capping the doorways are all being removed, cleaned and prepared for refitting. It would have been nice to replace these four-piece examples with the superior one-piece type which fit under the hinge between the body, but this would involve very time consuming stripping down, hinge removal and door resetting. For that reason we have decided to let this one go and simply stabilise any early corrosion and refit the old strips. A substantial amount of supporting woodwork modifications are also being made around the windows on the interior, to make window fitting and removal easier in the future.
Further down the vehicle, a start has been made on preparing for the future phases of the corridor and compartments. The first compartment window has been removed, following dismantling of the surrounding wooden trim.
British Railways 1957 Class 101 Railcar Driving Trailer Composite Lavatory E56062 (SILVER)
Focus has remained on doorways, with the first one receiving more metalwork. The second doorway has also been stripped out with wooden trim and door jambs removed allowing all of the metalwork below to be needle gunned so we can see where we are. We believed the second door to be better than the first, but underneath things have proven to be just as bad! At least this doorway doesn’t have an out of shape door!
Removed seat frames continue to have their lower legs painted, many of these are up to gloss now, with a few still in undercoat.
British Railways 1958 Class 101 Railcar Driving Motor Brake Second M51188
No progress to report.
British Railways (LMS Design) 1949 20 Ton Brakevan B950133
No progress to report.
Metropolitan Cammell 1965 4 Wheel Petroleum Tank 53083
The Devil Tank successfully had its buffer changed this week, a fairly straightforward task for once. We extracted a spare buffer from stores but then discovered that all seven of our spares had the smaller buffer head whereas the tank should have the larger type. After a head scratch for a bit we spotted one of the box vans in the yard which are internal use only had been fitted with a larger buffer out of convenience.
Given box vans normally have the smaller type, we placed the (small) spare onto the box van and moved the larger one onto the tanker. The actual removal and fitting of the buffers was pain-free, with all bolts behaving.
Although we didn’t have much time, a quick clean up and a coat of anti-rust primer was applied to the area of bufferbeam normally covered by the buffer.
Whilst we had the tanker at Weybourne the air braking system (seldom used) was fully tested and found to be in working order. The wagon has therefore had its “fitted brake” ticket reinstated so provided it is moved around solo then it can run as an air braked train, which is not that common on the NNR.
