Friday 7th - Another Day at the Gym!
An extra blog, Today Bryan, Gerry and myself became part of the maintenance team. Our main task was to carry out buck-eye coupling exams on a rake of 8 coaches, to do this Tony and Ian (driving) split the rake for us. John A was our foreman and made sure we carried out each part of the exam meticulously.
Gerry seems to like lying down!
Bryan is checking the free movement of the buffers and applying oil which will help to keep things moving.
We use a simple jig plate to ascertain any excessive play in all the coupling parts, these are checked in a open and closed position.
A very large and heavy piece of kit. The locating pin is inspected for wear and checked in coupling up and down positions.
John A is checking that nothing has been left behind.
After checking 16 buck-eyes, it all has to be re-coupled. Bryan is plugging the electrics together.
Bit of assistance here in joining the vacuum pipes together.
We changed one Buck eye, which was deemed to be outside of the wear limits. These couplings are very heavy and ungainly, they are not easy to get into position.
Back in the day a plank and a beer crate were the normal tools for changing a buckeye coupler. To remove one end of the plank on the beer crate, lift the other end to take the weight and then lowered and the coupler walked down to the ground, the reverse got the coupler fitted nicely, no access for fork lifts in the middle of a set of sidings!
ReplyDeleteBy the way what you refer to as the locating pin was always called the "French Pin" failure to ensure the tails were down was the cause of many "breakloose" incidents where the pin worked out and the coupler head pivoted down, resulting in an emergency stop with a divided train.
Malcolm