Happy New Year everybody. I'm ashamed to say it's six months since last I wrote some words on the comings and goings at SRS - in that time we've shipped another half dozen Staffords, done the Bristol, Midlands and (last weekend) London Model Engineering Exhibitions, taken on another apprentice, a part time machinist (soon to be full time, with luck), lost Claire (temporarily, don't panic) and still found time to take a week off at Christmas.

Decorating, locomotives and Feng Shui

Those who’ve had cause to visit our house know it’s a bit of an ancient structure, originally a rather humble seventeenth century dwelling with barn adjacent, which was grandly extended in the early nineteenth century with wings added on the West and South sides to double its size and render it totally unheatable – later the barn was converted into stables and a coach-house as the house became home to three generations of the village doctor for the following hundred years.

Since buying the place we’ve been doing the big, boring, expensive jobs – new wiring, plumbing, central heating, sorted out the leaky roof, everything that hadn’t had a deal spent on it for the previous forty years. Not much to look at but important, before we could get round to the decorating, which is what has occupied Mrs P for much of 2011. She had a flurry of activity getting assorted household projects completed before Christmas, December seemed to be one long round of electricians, decorators, builders, plumbers, curtain-hangers - you name it, they visited.

Whilst I haven’t contributed a great deal to this part of the project (I’m not much of a colours and feng shui sort of chap), it has meant that engines dotted about the house can now be shown to full effect - we’ve ordered a new set of bookcases for the library which will take care of the boxes and boxes of books I’ve got and means I can actually look things up in “Model Engineer” again when I need to.

More pictures

Whilst on one of our innumerable runs to town before Christmas, confirming carpet and curtain colours, I spotted a fine oak sideboard in the furniture department. A quick measure up confirmed that it was spot-on the right size for a 7 ¼ inch gauge O2 which had, hitherto, been parked on the floor (which was safe, but not a desperately good place to appreciate a beautiful engine). Five minutes arm-twisting managed to liberate the sideboard from the showroom (the salesman had some crazy idea that he didn’t want to spoil his display and thought we might like to wait six weeks for one to be ordered), the next morning we ran the SRS van over and collected it – the O2 was in residence an hour later.

Station Road Steam – the office ladies

Many of you will have met or spoken on the phone to Claire who has run the office with ruthless efficiency for the last couple of years. She is largely responsible these days for the website, exhibition planning, handling all the phone calls (and a good number of my emails) and the packing/despatching of pretty much everything from a spare injector to a complete traction engine. She is now on maternity leave so Mrs P has come back to cover her absence until the summer.

The Station Road Steam ladies (Claire was eating for two by this time, so the dozen profiteroles you see her squaring up to was her daily allowance,
 supplemented by a couple of pints of brown ale at lunchtime)

Inevitably we’ve had a few hiccups in the transition period, if you’ve waited an unreasonably long time for a response to a call or email, my apologies. Similarly, given that I now have to keep the website updated, I only mark stock sold at the main updates – if you call and something you’ve seen shown as available is sold, that’s the reason.  

STOP PRESS: the happy event was actually last Thursday, 7lbs 4oz, both doing well

Shipping and insurance

Over the last year the business has grown substantially – partly as a result of the Stafford production line, we also have an ever-increasing amount of overhaul work coming in, in addition to the servicing and testing of second hand stock. One of the benefits of this is we can negotiate decent packing, shipping and insurance rates worldwide – we have cartons collected daily and crates going out most weeks (last Friday saw crates delivered for packing up engines to go to Japan, France, Australia and Scotland). As a result of this, we are changing the way we quote for shipping – full details are on the “Shipping” page – but the gist of it is we will quote packing and shipping as a single price, with insurance at ½% of insured value listed separately. We have negotiated this rate with our insurers and think it’s good value (the first engine sent out under the new policy just before Christmas cost the customer £65 to cover a £13000 engine going 6000 miles), however if you don’t want to take the insurance, let Jayne know and she will happily remove it from the invoice.

The first week back after Christmas was very busy...

Another large engine arrives

I bought another 10 ¼ inch gauge locomotive a few months ago – I’ve started to get a bit of a weakness for this size, it’s a bit like four inch scale traction engines, less a model, more a small “real” engine which you can sit on comfortably and drive using full-sized controls.

Given that the workshop was busy, it was some weeks before I could go and collect the engine. It had been pushed out of the shed awaiting my arrival, the idea being that I would steam it before loading. It hadn’t been used in some years, the railway it lives on – a lovely scenic run of around a mile through woodland – was closed on the day I visited so I had the place to myself.

The engine itself has a reputation as a bit of a “goer”, running on big wheels and with boiler pressed to 170psi. I hadn’t driven it before, nor driven on its railway, so it was with slight trepidation I opened the regulator and set off down the line. The cylinders soon warmed through, draincocks shut and I settled down to a steady run around. The engine’s reputation was certainly well-earned, even running at speed it responded urgently to a pull on the regulator with a hint of wheel slip. The boiler seemed, on my short drive, free-steaming – rather too free-steaming actually, I entered one of the tunnels with safety valves just feathering, smoke drifting back from the chimney and not a clue which way the line went in the pitch black interior. I eased off to what must have been no more than a walking pace, as the roof passed by inches above my head, speculating on the likelihood that anything had been left in the tunnel to keep out of the weather – a rake of coaches, a few tipper wagons… It was with some relief I saw sunlight appearing in the distance as the engine emerged into the autumn sunshine.

Safely back at the shed, it was less than an hour’s work to drop the fire, blow the boiler down and get loaded before a steady trundle home. It hasn’t been out since, although I’m hoping to take it to a friend’s railway in the next village as soon as I get a day free.

The networking professional

I don’t do a great deal of this new-fangled “social networking” – my boys are keen exponents, Facebooking, Myspacing and Twittering until the cows come home, but it’s passed me by. However, recently I’ve started getting invites to join a thing called “LinkedIn” – I thought it was just spam to start with, but apparently not, it turns out to be a legitimate website which allows you to “Control your professional identity online… Find the people & knowledge you need to achieve your goals”. You sign up, tell them who you are, then invite everybody you’ve ever met to join as well.

All of this looks like harmless fun, allowing “networking professionals” to get together and tell each other how big their mortgages are and why they want a different job. What’s more of a problem is that LinkedIn – presumably in a desperate quest for new members – sends the invitation email repeatedly, reminding me that I haven’t joined up yet and that John Smith is still desperate to network with me. It recently got to the stage where I was receiving several a week, often from the same person – it was a bit like being shouted at by somebody with a megaphone in a room with a bad echo. I tried to unsubscribe, which didn’t work, so finally had to set up our spam filter to kill everything from the site.

To be honest I’m not sure there’s a person working in the country today less qualified than me to be called a networking professional. If you’ve invited me to join the club and not had a reply, my apologies, however if you really do think I have “knowledge which will help you achieve your goals” then you have either gravely overestimated my abilities or possibly need some more challenging goals.

Size matters

In the past I’ve often been surprised when people have turned up to see an engine at the workshop and said “oh, that’s much bigger than I thought it was going to be”. Sometimes they’re pleased, sometimes they go away empty-handed as it won’t fit in their car/shed/bedroom. Never thought it would happen to me, then before Christmas Mrs P and I went off for a couple of days to visit Kenilworth Castle and collect a Marshall stationary engine that I’d bought some time before – I’d only seen a picture of it on a pallet from which I guesstimated it at about half a ton.

Kenilworth Castle was excellent (especially the café, memorable parsnip and ginger soup for lunch). We had a day wandering about and an overnight in a good hotel nearby before setting off the following morning, fortified by a decent breakfast, to pick up the Marshall. It was located on an old industrial estate which was interesting in its own right, it manufactured shells during the war and had a rail network running around the yard. A forktruck was whistled up and the engine emerged from a shed looking about twice the size it did in the picture – my turn to say “ah, that’s quite a bit bigger than I thought…”

Marshall horizontal engine

Fortunately there was a weighbridge at the other end of the yard, so off we trundled to find out just how much trouble we were in. As the engine settled onto the scales, all eyes went to the readout on the wall as it went through 700, 800, 900, 1000 kilograms, before finally settling at 1170Kg. So much for half a ton then. Fortunately, the van is rated at 1500Kg, so out with spanners to remove the Pickering governor, which just fouled the roof, then the engine was pushed into the back. Steady drive back home, stopping only for a couple of hours to look around the RAF Museum at Cosford – highly recommended, great museum, good tea shop, clean loos and free admission!

The Garden Railway – “perchance it is not dead, but sleepeth”

It’s rare a week goes by without somebody asking how the garden railway’s going. The days when I was ahead of friend Martin up in Dumfries are long gone, in the last couple of years he’s got more line down than Network Rail, built an engine shed, fitted out a running workshop and is fast approaching crossing his river with a girder bridge. In contrast, my railway has languished for lack of time to get anything done on it over the last eighteen months.

Work started again in the Autumn, with the engine shed being extensively rebuilt. Regular readers may remember it was converted from an old pig sty which had been built onto the end of the stables in the nineteenth century. In hindsight, it wasn’t in the best of condition to start with, so having widened the door to accommodate a pair of Tinkerbells rather than a single Gloucester Old Spot the next thing that happened was the roof started to push the side wall out, cracking the new brick arch in the process. It’s been steadily getting worse for the last year or so, we finally bit the bullet and pulled the lot down to ground level. Dal our builder came round with Jason, his son, and did a fine job putting the thing back up again, with completely new roof timbers and roofing felt under the pantiles. The end result was well worth the effort, by raising the timbers, I can now walk through the shed without bending double.

More pictures

Next job is to take up the track – you may remember it was only thrown down temporarily (without ballast, before I’m reminded) to get material up to the tunnel when we built it. There’s a dip in the middle of the long straight running up to the tunnel, which means running back towards the engine shed there’s a distinct rollercoaster effect requiring delicate balancing of the regulator to avoid arriving in the station either at Mach 2 or not at all. I’ll level this up and relay the station area, connecting up to the turntable which has been installed for a couple of years now but still waits for a rail connection. To be continued, as they say...

January 27th 2012

News Archive

Aug 2011 - Stafford production, visit to darkest Norfolk and the Bure Valley Railway
Feb 2010 - Alexandra Palace Show report, the new office
Nov 2010 - Stafford production, toxic discussion forums, 7 1/4 inch gauge AGM, steam indicator
January 2010 - Midlands Model Engineer Exhibition, Fire at the local gas depot, blown fusible plug
August 2009 - Steve joins us, Stafford running at EMR, Windmill Farm Railway, Dogdyke Pumping Station 
April 2009 - The new engine "Stafford", Alexandra Palace Show, a backyard foundry
December 2008 - Self-storage, annealing copper, Tinkerbell stone train in the snow
November 2008 - Rutland Railway Museum, Caradoc converted to a VBT locomotive, LittleLEC
August 2008 - Harrogate Show pictures, Martin's new engine shed, lethal steam seat warmer
March 2008 - New machining centre, solid modelling software, fixing the roof
December 2007- new lathe delivered, 7 1/4 inch progress in Dumfries, visting an interesting engineer 
 September 2007 - Holiday in North Wales, new machinery for the workshop
June 2007 - Station Road Steam at Harrogate Show, herd of Tinkerbells, Martin's railway
March 2007 - Building a garden railway competition, A Workshop in Herefordshire
January 2007 - Miniature lathes and photography, Midlands Exhibition, Churnet Valley Railway, testing small boilers
October 2006 - Updates on part-built and projects
July 2006 - Evergreens Miniature Railway, local 10 1/4 line, collecting the Pacific from Cleethorpes
April 2006 - Progress in the workshop, visit to the National Railway Museum, visit to Woody Bay
January 2006 - Moving to new units, grit-blasting my hands, shiny Romulus
October 2005 - Stamford SME, Sam starts the restoration of "Pendle Witch", Casterton Working Weekend
August 2005 - New workshop, Thurston Pacific back from Cleethorpes
May 2005 - Berkely Light Railway, dodgy boiler certificates, full-size ploughing engines at auction
January 2005 - digging
October 2004 - initial planning for the garden railway
July 2004 - Fowler ploughing engines in Yorkshire
May 2004 - Moving the workshop, a 9 1/2 inch gauge garden railway
Apr 2004 - Holiday in Shropshire & The Severn Valley Railway, LNER liveried Black 5
Feb 2004 - Refacing a Tangye slide valve, new acquisition 10 ton Aveling roller
2004 - 12 1/4 inch gauge Pacific