Tuesday 22nd - A very mixed bag

It was tempting to call this "More lines", following Alex's Saturday posting, but "A very mixed bag" would be a better description. We certainly had a good number attending with staff more associated with Thursdays and Saturdays coming in to complete outstanding jobs.

The arm exercise today was partaken by Ainsley and myself with the delivery of 35 pieces of plyboard (for doors, walls and floors)  and hardboard (for ceilings). Steve will be sorting it all out on Saturday.

Moving on now to the timed projects, although the season start has now been pushed back a week, we still have to get everything ready by our own planned deadlines.

Progress in RBr 1672 is good with respect to the fitting of the two new water heaters. Richard I is installing a new socket. The first heater has been temporarily removed.

 Bryan, from our Metalwork team, is sorting out a backplate for the second heater.

Up on the Workshop mezzanine where the Electrical team's bench is located, Richard II shows frustation as to why, despite all his testing, the buzzer on the new equipment fails to work. This is the small black cylinder in the top section, which sounds when the heaters have reached the required temperature. Knowing Richard, he will get this sorted out.

The other timely project being worked on today is of course TSO 5042 and completing the lining out. Maurice tapes up the remaining lines on the Cotswold side needing black gloss. When he had finished this he painted the fittings for the north end door (handles, stops and droplight top bar).              

On the Malvern side Roger tapes up the lower line for gloss black. The wire is suspended from the gutter and is very convenient for hanging the roll. When doing the upper lines the tape can be propped up in the gutter, as shown in the previous photo.

 

Richard also worked on the Malvern side and, unable to locate the yellow tape we use for lining out, tried the green tape that we acquired from our supplier (sent in lieue of the normal white general purpose tape). To everyone's surprise and delight it proved to be as good as the yellow, so a very good fallback if necessary. 

With 5042 it's now into the very last stages with window cleaning, paint snagging and a few other minor jobs left to do. The coach will be shunted back out on Saturday.

On now to the current restoration project with CK 16221. This door is having a complete new set of back panels, door pull and base, all of which will look lovely with 2-3 coats of varnish.

 Moving to the second bench, Ainsley is attaching the finger pull on this door.

Cleaning up of the sliding compartment doors continues with Tony working on the droplight runners.

Plenty of noise with Dave sanding down one of the maintenance cupboard doors and Tony now doing the main sanding down of his door.

 More varnishing by Keith of items from 16221. 

Two more chairs from RBr 1675 have been stripped by the Upholstery team and, having been given a light sand by Keith, are being given the first coat of varnish. Note the new underseat panel and, if you look closely, it can be seen that in fact the panel is in two sections - the reason for this is described below.

In Upholstery, another stripped chair awaits the fitting of the underseat panel.

A large piece of hardboard has been cut into the relevant sized portions for the underseat panels. The template sits on one of these. The line drawn across the template marks the fold point, necessary originally so that the template could be fitted underneath, the chair legs and crossbars making access difficult. The fold point in turn marks where about a quarter of each portion has to be cut off for the same reason.

Dave is preparing more of the small sections.

Finally some progress with the new door safety barriers, now being painted in an initial coating of yellow. A second coat will go on and then some black stripes. As previously explained, these will be fitted in a coach doorway where the door is missing, but not being used for access, and will prevent the possibility of someone falling out. The barriers are locked in using the small revolving attachments.

Saturday 19th - Doing lines

 With exactly 1 week to go on TSO 5042, it was reassuring to find us all on finishing off jobs. We cracked on with the black lining out, Michael having his first go at it and doing very well:

With Dave on the other side doing the same:

While I finished off the remainder of the lettering, captured by Dave:

Who was then distracted by Tony, one of our regular blog readers, who came in to donate a whole heap of towels and other bits and pieces, thank you Tony! Naturally he got the full tour from Dave.

Once I'd finished the lettering I joined in and zipped along to finish the bottom line on the Cotswold side, again captured by Dave, who insisted I include both pictures he'd taken of me!

While going along I did find evidence that, with all the coach ID lettering I've ben doing too, perhaps I'd had enough of that for a while...

Oops! Happily an easy fix that one.

Outside there was again a lot of shunting, mainly I think to finish off the maroon set, there being one more coach to add, and a few connection issues to sort out. The team discuss the first moves:

Unfortunately they didn't arrange the weather very well, it was pretty wet and by the time I ventured outside into the now bright afternoon, they'd finished:

There was lots of good progress on CK 16221 today. Simon and Steve here are feeding the condensation tubes through the corridor side of the coach:

Later on a real milestone as some substantial panelling started to go on:

Elsewhere Dave was cutting more insulation to size for the walls:

Dave and Robert were sanding more panelling:

 

And after shunting, Bob and Tony were bashing away on one of the compartment doors:

Meanwhile the door team were full steam ahead too, Ainsley on the belt sander adjusting a finger pull:

Robert marking out a panel, and Ben behind with the fiddly door locks:

The workshop area had the usual suspects, Phil was working on some pipework for the RBr I think, while Paul was fiddling around with some bolts for the Mink:

Later giving the door lintels a coat of dark grey undercoat:

John started off the day turning some pins for the corridor door stops:

He wa slater found underneath BCK 21092 in the barn, doing what exactly I'm not sure, I guess something to do with the pipework for the new heater:

As indeed was Ken:

It was just Jenny and Laura upstairs today, starting on the last batch of bubble car seats:

These are all that are left now apparently:

Thursday 17th - Continuing preparations and an extra bit

Another day with more major shunting in the lengthy process of putting back our three rakes as we would like them, plus a host of other activities in preparation for the new season. 

Apologies for fewer photos today but 5042 kept me busy.

Firstly, the Paintshop whiteboard with the list of jobs written up last thing on Tuesday for David on Wednesday. Almost all involved TSO 5042 and all were completed, bar the extra job with the safety barriers. David was joined by Jeff who had swapped his day to Wednesday. 

Continuing with 5042, with the corner demarcation tapes removed, Martin began by painting the gloss black up to the edge of the chocolate and cream. He then went on to add more orange to the electrical connections, and then painted the lamp brackets.

One of the major outstanding jobs with 5042 was to clean up the insides of the window frames, which were pretty grubby and tarnished to say the least. Roger, from our Indoor Gang, cleans up the table for this bay after completing the window frame cleaning. The formica on the wall sides also needed a good clean and Roger sorted this out as well.

Bob K. and I were also involved. The other aspect of the windows was to ensure that the sliders were free and worked. After the painting, it is inevitable that most will be stuck, but a long screw driver inserted between each set soon loosens them. After that it was some frantic sliding back and forth to ease their movement and for toning up the arms! Roger then applied copper ease to the tracks and hopefully all the sliders should now be working fine. They will be checked again before the coach goes back out.

All the door backs needed more coats of varnish. Bob did the Cotswold side and I followed with the Malvern side.

With the compartments done, the next to have the window cleaning treatment was the large north vestibule and toilet compartment, with both Roger and I involved here too. Bob S. later joined us to paint some fresh silver Hammerite on the air vent grills and toilet compartment heater cover.

Bob's first job was to carry on with the paint repairs to the catering doors on RBr 1672. Still some more to do on these and the surrounding exterior panelling, but they are looking much better now.

Inside the kitchen area the installation of the two new water heaters continues, involving both Richard I and Phil.

One of the new heaters.

 

 

(Photo: Alex) - many thanks to Alex for this photo as I missed all the shunting being done by Ian and Neil on the 03 and 04 respectively, with Andy and Clive as the ground crew (I did actually try to capture some of it, but every time I looked out there was nothing going on!). The aim today was to get the Maroon rake marshalled together into something like the old pre-Covid formation.

With the shunting completed Alex continued the internal renumbering of doors and windows. The one big change in the rake is of course the replacement of BSK 35308 with newly refurbished BSKD 34929, and there's nothing more annoying than bird droppings on the new paint! 

There are still some minor things to do in 34929's compartments such as putting back the seat numbers. All the shunting to some extent prevented Alan, Geoff, Paul and Dennis continuing their internal rake preparations. I'm afraid my efforts in 5042 meant that I missed them too.

 

The works plate for 34929. It has been a long hard battle refurbishing this coach. Let's hope her future passengers appreciate it, especially the extended seating facility.

Another of Alex's jobs during the day was to highlight the new replica works plates for the Queen Mary brake van and Mink A van.

 

Richard was back in to create the door lintels for the Mink A van. These have been primed ready for undercoating. 

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An extra bit from Alex when he was recently at Toddington

Lastly, I'll just jump in here with a little update about the GWR water tank wagon that arrived last summer. Although it doesn't look much different to how it arrived, a fair amount of work on it has taken place (beyond being a landing stage for I think 3850's cab roof!)

Most of it has involved taking bits apart, liberally applying graphite grease, and reassembling, which is not very photogenic, and nor is it easy to get the camera out when you're covered in the stuff too! But we're getting there on that front now. Wednesday evening Mark and I came in for a few hours to progress things. When disassembling the drawgear a few weeks ago we found the main pins were rather banana-shaped!

Newly machined ones were produced which allowed us to put it all back together:

Having done a fair few drawbar disassemblies in preparation for the goods train last year, one thing we found was that we could do with a few more spanners big enough to wind off the huge nuts that hold everything in place. The order from the laser cutter has come back, that should make life easier:

Naturally we had to test one out, perfect!

The next big job is riveting the top plates onto the chassis, so we spent a bit of time aligning things as best we could with some temporary bolts, before moving onto giving everything a good scrub as there was a thick layer of verdigris from its time on a farm:

We had planned to splash some paint around last thing but it was at this point we discovered a track tamper had arrived outside the gate, and by the time we'd let them in it really was getting a bit late, so that'll wait 'til next time.

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