Saturday saw me climbing up on top of Emmet’s boiler to remove her whistle and the fibreglass dome cover before unscrewing the nuts securing the cover plate of her steam dome. After a little persuasion with a hammer and cold chisel the seal on the gasket came loose and I was able to lift the plate with its two safety valves clear, and got my first look down into a steam loco’s boiler (empty at the moment, of course, after last weekend’s washout).

You can see what I saw in the fifth photo below. The smaller pipe dead centre takes steam to the manifold in the cab, while the larger pipe above it (actually on the left side in relation to the loco’s orientation) feeds steam into the regulator. The other pipes you can see running across underneath are boiler tubes (plus a longitudinal stay).

With that done I climbed down and we went into the cab to remove the caps on the water gauges and probe the channels through the back plate of the boiler to make sure they were free from scale or other blockages. The last job on the loco itself was to unscrew the fusible plug from the crown plate inside the firebox. Since Emmet is only a small loco with a correspondingly small firebox she only has a single fusible plug, accessed by reaching into the firebox. On a larger loco – like most standard gauge types – you usually need to climb inside the firebox to do the equivalent job, so I got off lightly here!

Fusible plug in hand, along with the washout plugs, it was off to the workshop to clean them all using a wire brush. It’s important that the threads are free from contamination so that they engage with the corresponding threads in the boiler and seal tightly: a poorly-seated plug can blow out under pressure which as you can imagine is potentially very dangerous. This was the last of the jobs to be done to make Emmet ready for her upcoming boiler inspection which we’re hoping to book in the next couple of weeks. It’s likely to be a weekday, so I’ll try to get the day off work and be there to see what goes on.

The rest of the day was spent working on four new brake blocks. These had been cast in iron for us, and require bolt holes drilling before they can be mounted on the loco. First step was to use an angle grinder to clean up the faces where we’d be drilling: the surface of the casting is hard and rough from the sand used in the mould and can damage drill bits. I measured and marked the centres for drilling, using a punch to give the drill bit something to centre itself on.

I learned that unlike drilling steel, when working with cast iron you don’t use lubricant/coolant as the composition of the metal makes it essentially self-lubricating. Also, whereas steel is ductile with tools slicing material off in ribbons of swarf, cast iron produces filings as the cutting tools chip material away. We worked up through drill sizes, and on my first go with the larger bit I found it kept grabbing and seizing up as it came through the bottom face of the brake block. After that I learned to watch the drill’s progress on the pillar drill’s depth gauge, and as it started to come through the other side, rather than maintaining a constant pressure, I would gently nibble away at the last bit of material. It didn’t stick again.

There’s more drilling still to do: we need to get the holes up to around 30 mm diameter. Plenty of other jobs on the to do list as well, so expect plenty more maintenance-related updates before we start running trains again mid-March.

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