Restoration diary

It was quite a busy weekend with Dave, Chris, Tom, Steve & Sarah attending both days and Ian, Pete & Mark on site Sunday. Toby the dog, who could become un-official mascot with regular site attendance, was also there!! Ian & Pete continued with the quest of torqeuing up the big end bearing caps, only a couple left to do.

Tom repaired/replaced as required all the runner timbers below the droplights. This completes all the internal frame repairs in both cabs.  The potentiometer stand in Renown was straightened, welded, cleaned and refitted by Chris - it had been damaged and bent during the removal of the ETH/aux gens before RRRG bought the locos. Dave continued cleaning up under the no1 cab floor in Renown, also assisited others.

Steve & Sarah continued identifying cut cables in Renown concentating at the cubicle end. They opened up the Battery Isolation Switch to identify cables, the rear section of the switch was removed to assist this process.

Mark removed floor-mounted conduits from the generator area in Repulse. The conduits will be replaced with those removed from 50040 prior to its scrapping. The cleared floor was cleaned.

Ian & Pete stretched another two pistons' worth of stretch bolts, before having to abandon this until a spanner can be bent, as the power unit internal structural webbing is now getting in the way of using the spanner properly. They then helped Dave loosen the bolts on the spare bogies to allow the traction motors to be removed sometime this year for overhaul. I test fitted the other two small boards that go behind the divert contactors, and found they fit easily. These two boards house the ETH overvolt relay HOVR & it's associated resistor Z24, the ETH voltage sensing resistor Z23, the ETH earth parallel resistor Z69, the ETH earth fault relay HEFR, & it's associated resistor Z62, and the ETH detector relay HDR. I bolted the left-hand board in place and wired in HOVR, Z23, Z24 & Z69.

Chris & Tom spent four days on site doing various jobs including repairing, straightening & painting the mounting pedestal for the load limiting pot, cabside corrosion repairs to No.2 cab of Repulse, collecting the spare auxiliary gen from Carnforth & taking it to a secure location, continuing to see if a new aux contact mechanism can be made for the reverser for Renown, creating shelving for me in the air filter area of Repulse and various other jobs.

Dave as seems to be the case most weekends at the moment, spent both days doing various jobs, then helped Ian & Pete stretch the stretch bolts on another three power unit big ends on a miserable Sunday when it rained continuously. I wired the auxiliary contacts on BMR1, GFR & OIR relays and the Z59 resistor on the board behind the fuse cabinet in Repulse.

Dave was on site all weekend whilst Steve & Sarah spent Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday there. Dave carried out various work on brake rigging and some bodywork both on Repulse. He also looked into preparing the traction motors for lifting from the two spare bogie sets, I think the fixing bolts are proving very tough!!!

Steve & Sarah continued identifying the cut cables in Renown. The going was very slow this weekend as the cover to the water header tank level switch would not budge so in the end with help from Dave the whole level switch assembly was removed from the tank. Once the whole assembly was removed the cover was prised away to reveal the cable connections. The two level switch cables were identified and labelled. The level switch operation was tested and found to be good and therefore the whole assembly was reinstalled.

A further 2 cables was identified at the Fire Alarm Relay No1. All the cables were retested at the AWS Relay Box to prove we had identified these.
Steve and Sarah took an hour out on Sunday to meet up with John Patrick - Peak Rail Safety Officer to complete their Personal Track Safety certification.