The 2014 Season Kicks off in Fine Style

Clive has been very active in his new role as the 'Working Engine Manager' and has made considerable improvements in the organisation of the oil store.  From a cleaners point of view, your first task if you required a bucket of soapy water to wash over the boiler cladding with was to find the least dirty bucket of those available, take it off and clean all the oil/diesel/grime out of it before it was in a fit state use.  We now have a couple of buckets that are for soapy water and nothing else, so you can be reasonably confident that they will be fairly clean to start with:

No diesel/oil

You'll also notice that there is a pair of scissors and a Stanley knife chained to the bench for use in cutting up cleaning rags.   

The three oil bunds have now been labeled so that you know what you'll find in each one:

No more surprises

Firemen will appreciate the fact that we now have a bin clearly labeled to contain oily rags only.  Previously old rags whether wet with water, diesel or oil all seemed to get bundled in together.  If your rags fizzled when you tried to light them, but not actually burn, then you knew that you had inadvertently found some that were wet with water rather than something more combustible.

No wet rags

There is even a washing line in there, for drying wet rags on, so that once dry they can then be used for lighting up.  I'd have shown you a photo, but I don't believe in airing dirty laundry in public.

There is also a small tin bucket for transporting oily rags to the locos:

Already being misused, it's got wood in it

I've been informed that this particular bucket has a small hole in the bottom (I know a song about that) and that excessively liberal application of accelerants to the rags will result in you leaving a trail of diesel from the oil store to the loco and quite likely all over the cab floor too.  Lighting up under those circumstances might be ill advised.  That said, at least one of our firemen isn't averse to burning cab floors, though he usually puts the cab floor into the firebox before setting it alight.  

Clive relaxing after his endeavours with a well earned cup of tea in the Flag and Whistle

Clearly there is a strong element of favouritism going on here, you'll notice Clive has a cup to put his tea in, I wasn't deemed worthy a cup.  Sean was deemed worthy of getting a cup, along with what appeared to be about a gallon of coffee.  We came to the conclusion that this is a new ploy by the GWSR to keep volunteers awake and busy doing things.  Sean is probably still wide awake even now, several days later.

Sean wishing he hadn't drunk all that coffee

Finally, the long awaited first train of the season pulled out of Toddington.  As mentioned in the last blog post, the honour of being the first loco fell to the 8F, 8274:

Kicking off in style

Jamie, Cliff and Dan had the honour of being the first crew.

Dinmore Manor's most recent Facebook page suggests that she may be ready to run within the next week or so.  To that end, feverish activity was taking place all over her.  Setting the valve timing was continuing on from Friday and at one point it involved Steve apparently acting as a human frame stretcher:

Steve between boiler and frames

I have no idea how he managed to get himself under the boiler like that, or how he managed to get back out.  I don't think that we had to call the fire brigade to extricate him though.

On to Sunday, I was down to clean 5542.  The previous plan that the 8F would work on both Saturday and Sunday had changed yet again.  I have to say that I felt a bit of a fraud, 5542 was already spotlessly clean as several people including me had descended on it on Saturday and cleaned and polished her to within an inch of her life.  There was really very little to do.  I found myself as much as anything hunting around trying to find odd bits that had been missed the day before.

Ship Prairie shape and Swindon fashion and the sun hasn't peeped over the horizon yet

Later on, 5542's shadow on Foremarke Hall's tender

Alongside her new stable mate, Dinmore Manor

 There was a small amount of shunting to do before we could set off.  The Saturday had been heaving with passengers, we'd had a couple of coach parties turn up at Toddington as well as numerous cars.  2807's tender was in the car park awaiting turning and had proved to be a bit of an impediment to the coach drivers, so we needed to shunt it out of the way before we set off.

Fetching 2807's tender back in from the car park

If you've been reading this blog through the closed season, you'll have hopefully been keeping an eye on the other blogs too.  If so, like me, you can't fail to have been impressed by the sheer amount of work that has been going on up and down the railway by other departments.  Some of the fruits of their labours can be seen from the train.

Replaced track section at Hailes bridge

Replaced bridge at JJ Farms

Cheltenham Race Course platform 2 is much extended since last season

A few slips have been shored up:

Dixton cutting

That's not to mention all the things that you can't see from the train like the continued Pheonix like resurrection of Broadway station.  I daresay that some of the carriages that we were pulling around had recently been out-shopped by the C&W team at Winchcombe.The fact that the line wasn't flooded after all the recent rain is testament to the sterling efforts of the lineside drainage team.   There has been much more activity amongst the various departments of the railway too, check their blogs to find out more if you haven't done so already.

The crew for Sunday was John (driver) and Tina (firewoman fireperson fireman):

John and Tina

The hose at the Cheltenham water tower still has several leaks which seem to spray water in all directions.  John and Tina decided sheltering in the hut beneath the water tower was safest whilst the water valve was open:

Tina nearly got caught by one of the leaks...

... and joined John out of harms way in the hut under the water tower

The return journey proved to be a little interesting, when we were getting close to Toddington, we discovered that the three signals leading up to the platform were against us:

Board on.

 We couldn't realistically claim that it was foggy or that snow was falling, so we waited for two minutes before I descended from the cab and called the signal box to find out what the delay was.  I was informed that the signals weren't working and that we had permission to pass the next three signals at danger and proceed at caution into platform one.  The rule book allows for this along with a few other situations, where with the signalman's permission it is allowed to pass a signal at danger; to approach the signal box for further instructions, for shunting purposes, for a defective signal that can't be cleared, with an engineer's train into a section under an absolute possession, to render assistance to a broken down train and during pilotman operation.  Before we set off, I needed to take the token back along the North West (Malvern) side of the train to the meet the guard and inform her of why we were about to pass a signal at danger.  If I hadn't done that,  she would have assumed that we were about to unintentionally pass the signal at danger and would have halted the train from the brake carriage.  Needless to say the brake carriage was at the far end of the train from the locomotive.  It's a long walk on the ballast.  

Before Sunday, I had never been on the footplate of a loco passing a signal at danger, it just felt wrong, even though it was completely in order and sanctioned by the signalman.  

Neil, our Operations Manager happened to be on the train as a passenger and we dropped him off at the signal box to fix it.  I have no idea what the problem was, but it was sorted by the time that we returned.

Bearing in mind that we've just endured the wettest winter on record, with what seems like solid rain since October and most of the low-lying parts of the country under water, it came as a more than welcome surprise to find that the sun shone all day long:

Running round at Laverton under a clear blue sky

In fact the only white blobs in the sky came from 5542

At the beginning of the season, most firemen are keen to get in as much practice at firing as possible to re-hone their skills and the chances of a humble cleaner being let loose with the shovel are slim.  Tina of course managed to make the whole thing look easy even though she hadn't fired since last year and decided after one round trip that she had got back into it well enough. She caught me by surprise at Toddington when one minute before departure she said "You'd best start building your fire up".  After the delays due to the broken signals etc and taking on water at Toddington, the scheduled reasonably sized break had evaporated and we were off pretty much as soon as we got back on the footplate from filling the water tanks.  The fireman has to managed three things:  boiler pressure, boiler water level and the fire.  If any two are good, you can recover the third.  If only one is good, you're in trouble, if none are good you're "Down the pan", "In the nick" and "Having to stop for a blow up".  There are other expressions in use, but those are the printable ones.  

The look on Tina's face suggested that I was being tricked here and sure enough a quick check suggested that I was in trouble.  The pressure was not too far off the red line, but the water gauge was showing precious little water and what little was left of the fire would be off up the chimney as soon as John opened the regulator.  What I really wanted at this time (other than a miracle) was for lots of small lumps of coal to get on the fire, which having a larger surface area than a similar weight of big lumps would burn quicker and thus give off their heat energy quicker.  Needless to say all that seemed to be coming down from the bunker was lumps the size of a small car and I had no time to break them up.  I got a few shovels full of these large lumps into the back corners, opened both dampers fully and we were off.  I'm sure I saw John wink at Tina as if to say "This will be entertaining".  Once we were safely moving, I opened the firebox doors, raised the flap and then started filling in the sides and front of the firebox. When I'd raised a few extra pounds of pressure, I stuck on an injector to slowly raise the water level.  

Things were looking a bit better by the time we reached Winchcombe.  I suggested to John that we wait in the platform for a while to recover a bit more, but he was confident that we had enough water and pressure to make it through the tunnel, so off we went. John was right of course and we emerged out of Greet tunnel quite safely.  By the time we got through Dixton cutting and were on the start of the long downhill section to Cheltenham, those large lumps of coal were now beginning to burn properly and it didn't help that I'd thrown on way too many of them.  5542 was of course blowing off quite merrily by the time that we reached Cheltenham.  According to John I owed both him and Tina £5 each every time 5542 blew off.  This was looking like it was going to be an impoverishing experience.  Mercifully I had 5542 back under control by the time we left Cheltenham and my wallet wasn't too badly damaged in the process.  On the plus side, you learn far more when things don't go according to plan.  I re-learned that I should be careful not to 'panic fire', especially when it comes to 5542.  I also learned not to trust Tina or John!

We have a new volunteer in the steam loco dept, it was Aaron's first day on Sunday.  Steve was busy giving him a guided tour of the railway which included joining us on the footplate for the run around at Cheltenham:

Aaron tries the cab of 5542 for size.

Thanks to both Steve and Aaron for helping empty out the ash pit later on at disposal time.

Original forged steel BR or big four firing shovels can fetch exorbitant prices. I had promised myself that I wouldn't bother trying to obtain one, but get by with one of the perfectly good modern day pressed steel firing shovels.  My resolve was put to the test recently, when Mark Shere-Massey who will shortly be emigrating to Canada (it's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to avoid being on this blog) announced that he had an ex-LMS Bulldog brand firing shovel for sale.  I can overcome everything except temptation.  You've guessed it, a certain quantity of beer vouchers bearing her majesty's likeness have changed hands and the shovel is now mine.  Mark brought it along on Sunday and handed it over to me.  This was at the precise moment that Tina had announced that I might want to think about building up the fire, so in my panic, I'm not at all sure that I managed to thank Mark or not.  Anyway, many thanks Mark and best wishes for your new life in Canada.  I'm reliably informed that the interweb works over there, so I hope you'll be keeping in touch with all your old friends here on the GWSR via this and the many other blogs that the railway has.

An old photo of Mark from last year's gala

The shovel itself is a little on the big side for 5542, there isn't room to swing a cat on 5542's footplate, a small kitten perhaps, but definitely not a cat. It will be perfect for all of our tender locos though and possibly 4270 when that is in steam.   I lined up my new (well new to me) shovel alongside Tina's (Lucas brand, stamped BR(S)) shovel which she has on indefinite loan from Tom Couling.

If only they could talk, I wonder what stories they could tell

I can just imagine what Ade will say on my next proper firing lesson, something along the lines of "Well you've got no excuse now".  I'm obviously going to have to think of something before then.

A little later during a quick cake break at Winchcombe whilst waiting for the DMU to cross us, I took this photo of Tina in front of the gun powder van.  I was sorely tempted to put this out as a 'Photo Caption Competition', but I'll spare her that.

X marks the spot!

The warm weather brought a few of the lines stalwarts out to ride in the train and generally heckle the crew:

Derek and Ben took first and second places in the  "Inappropriate t-shirt competition"

Mike took a break from working on Dinmore Manor and very kindly bought us all ice creams

Finally, we rolled back into Toddington for the last time of the day and it was time to dispose of 5542 and put her to bed.  The job has been made much easier thanks to the new concrete apron by the ash pit that allows her to be coaled up by the pit rather than having to specially run round onto the unloading road in the car park.

John coals up 5542 on the ash pit

Damping down the ash pan and cleaning the residue ash off of the brake rigging has been made easier by the installation of a hose pipe and tap inside the ash pit.  It greatly reduces the likelihood of the hose being inadvertently run over by the loco too.

New hose pipe installed in the pit