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Brakes and Sleepers
Wasn’t expecting to spend last weekend working on the railway but, as is often the case, plans changed. The Museum was closed on Saturday for a training day and several of my railway colleagues were participating, but myself and our head of steam excused ourselves and spent the day in the workshop instead, continuing our work to put the mounting holes into Emmet’s brake blocks. Since the milling machine isn’t back working yet we used our large Holbrook lathe.
My idea, which we tried first, was to clamp the block to the cross slide with the cutting tool in the lathe’s chuck, but we didn’t have any clamps long enough to hold the block in place. Plan B was to use the face plate, a large disc (13″ diameter) that attaches to the lathe spindle in place of the more usual chuck. Clamping something as large as a brake block is not simple, and because most of it is off-centre we needed to add counterweights to balance it out so that the whole shebang didn’t start trying to move around the workshop when we spun it up.
It took us a couple of hours to get it set up, and we ended up with about ⅛” clearance between the outside edges of the block and the lathe bed: it only just fit! The next difficulty was figuring out how to bore the holes out to the finished 30mm diameter as we discovered that the pilot holes I’d drilled previously were too small to fit a boring bar of the necessary length to reach all the way to the back. After trying a couple of drill bits in the tail stock we eventually hit upon one that had the correct Morse taper and was rigid enough not to be pulled off centre by the pilot holes not being perfectly concentric with where we needed the final hole to be.
That gave us a hole that was large enough to finish boring to the required diameter with a boring bar tool. I learned how to centre the cutting tool by aligning it against a live centre fitted into the tail stock, and took over operating the lathe for the final few passes. We were pleased to have finished one brake block, and the other three should be quicker now that we’ve worked out the details of how to do it with the tools we’ve got available. We’re nursing our 3-phase diesel generator, only running it for about 10 minutes at a time, and crossing our fingers that it lasts until we’ve completed this job. A 3-phase mains supply is planned but the work to install it hasn’t yet been scheduled.
I arrived early on Sunday and spent a bit of time in the workshop finishing off the Annett’s key by filing down the welds around the T-bar handle and cleaning up the surface with a fine file and emery paper. While I was doing that our head of P-way and another colleague arrived, and I locked the finished key away safely before joining them replacing sleepers. As I’m still training as a driver I was asked if I wanted to drive the engineering train and immediately said yes! A fairly minimal train comprising just Hunslet diesel-hydraulic no. 38 Weyfarer and a flatbed wagon to carry the tools and anything else we might need.
Although the weather was a little unsettled with occasional light showers it didn’t stop us cracking on. The first task was to finish installing four new plastic sleepers adjacent to a crossing – this was where I’d been working a couple of weeks ago when we removed the old, rotten sleepers and dug out the track bed. Other colleagues had continued the work last weekend so two of the four new sleepers were already spiked and they’d begun ballasting. Between us we sifted all the remaining soil-contaminated ballast that had been dug out and got the remaining two sleepers spiked, ballasted and tamped.
After a lunch break we figured we could do some spot replacements of single sleepers on the same part of the line: these don’t take nearly as much time since we don’t have to dig out the track bed and build back up. Instead, the spikes securing the track to the sleeper to be replaced are levered out with a big pry bar, and then the track is jacked up allowing the sleeper to be pulled out and the replacement slid in in its place. Then it’s a simple matter of drilling holes for the spikes, and hammering them in while checking that the gauge is accurate.
We removed the excess soil and old sleepers, making two trips – piling them on to the wagon and hauling the lot up to the other end of the line for disposal. All in all a lot of heavy manual work with shovels, spades, hammers and other tools, but enjoyable too. By the time we called it a day we’d replaced another three sleepers, and the only thing left to do was put the tools, wagon and loco away and lock up.
