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Back on track
Saturday started well; the museum with whom our railway shares the site held an open day to attract new volunteers so the place felt more alive than usual at this time of year with a good few people around. I managed to catch up with a couple of my colleagues who I’d not seen for a while. Then, fortified with a lovely mug of strong tea myself and another colleague headed to the workshop to tackle the Bridgeport milling machine.
We swapped over two of the solenoids: one that we knew was in good working order and one that we suspected might be faulty. Taking them out was fairly straightforward, but getting them back into place was fiddly to say the least and there was some cursing before we got things back together. Time for another well-deserved tea break (forget coal and diesel: it’s tea that keeps railways running) before firing up the three-phase generator and testing our work.
A mixed result: we’d unintentionally managed to get the coolant/lubrication pump back working but the spindle motor solenoid stubbornly refused to activate. Cue some head scratching and studying of the wiring diagram, then testing continuity with a multimeter before concluding that the problem appears to be with one of the current overload protection units. There are four of these but they all seem to be dialled in to different amperage settings so it’s not straightforward to swap them over. We reluctantly decided that it would need more specialist attention than we could provide and called it a day.
I used the rest of the afternoon to finish making a set of three retaining pins for points rodding stools. This involved sawing some steel bar to length, filing the ends to remove any sharp burrs, and drilling holes for split pins at each end. Then I cut rollers from some steel pipe, deburred the cut ends, and threaded them onto the bars. Another colleague suggested I stamp my initials into each and leave my mark for posterity.
With the weather forecast promising a dry day, on Sunday I started getting things together in the yard to install new stools to support point rodding. Although we don’t have any particularly long runs we did have a couple of rods of around 20 feet in length supported at only one place along their length. Ideally the rods should have supports about 4½ feet from each end, and around every 6-7 feet in between: this helps keep them straight and makes the points operate more reliably.
Each stool consists of a reinforced cast concrete base with cast aluminium frames bolted to the top that support a roller on which the points rod rests: rods have an inverted-U shaped cross-section forming a channel on their underside which sits comfortably on the rollers. A retaining pin is fastened in the frames above the rod to prevent it lifting.
Installing a stool involves digging a hole under the rod about 18 inches deep, a foot wide and two feet long so that the concrete support can be lowered down and slid underneath before the frames are bolted in place holding the roller. We then pack soil underneath to bring the stool to the correct height and position, and operate the points to ensure the rod runs smoothly over the roller without rubbing against the frames before back-filling the hole, tamping the earth down to hold it the support firmly in place.
We put in two new stools and moved an existing one to a better position. Together with the other P-way work over the last few weeks (repairing a track panel, adjusting sets of points, replacing sleepers, re-spiking loose rails and tightening loose bolts on fishplates and check rails) we’ve got the trackwork in our yard in decent condition now.
Our attention now turns to the main running line for the next bit of track maintenance before our running season starts next month: our head of P-way has been surveying the line and she’s identified sleepers in need of replacement. We finished the day by taking turns with a big two-person saw cutting two of our new 2.6 metre plastic sleepers in half to give us four of the correct width for our 2 foot gauge. There’ll be a track gang working next weekend to put these in, and if I’m not too busy with steam maintenance I’ve said I’ll give them a hand.
