I’ve decided to give up apologising for the
ever-increasing gaps between these news pages coming out – it’s only the
more noticeable given that Claire seems to be turning out a website update
just about weekly at the moment (I dread Thursday afternoons when she starts
stalking around the workshop chivvying me up to write some words for the
things she’s listed – the ultimate threat being that she’ll write up the
descriptions herself if I don’t get copy on her desk pronto).
The main reason for my lack of scribbling the last few months is the sheer volume of stuff going through the workshop – rebuilds (with a 10 ¼ inch gauge 4-4-0 and 15 inch gauge Pacific in for major work), overhauls, new build “Staffords” (all the 2009/2010 engines now sold with another twelve well-advanced in the current 2010 batch), servicing work on engines coming in for sale and an almost endless list of boilers to test. It’s a miracle any of us get home for tea and a shower some nights!
Latest delivery, at speed on a wet day - more pictures
The Stafford production line has become busy over the
last few months and is squeezing our space to the limit until we get the new
building which will combine a servicing/overhaul department, offices and
erecting shop for new engines – although not finally decided, it may be that
the old unit is used for an expanded machine shop rather than letting it. The
workforce currently numbers five – whilst there is a requirement for at
least one more man (and possibly two) in the workshop, recruitment is of
necessity on hold until the new year when we should have more room.
Wheelsets everywhere! More
pictures
The second batch of engines numbers twelve, the hope
being when we got started earlier in the year that this would give us some
buffer stock when pre-ordered engines had been despatched. We had some welcome
help over the summer when Sam joined us for six weeks, getting the great
majority of the rods and motionwork cranked out on the machining centre –
every year at the end of the holidays it leaves a bigger gap when he goes back
to school!
September saw me off to the Echills Wood Railway for the
7 ¼ inch gauge society AGM. Adrian Grimmett of the Engineer’s Emporium was
responsible for organizing the trade stands this year and had roped me in when
we met at a boiler conference earlier this year at the Fosse (itself an
excellent do, a great deal of information and common sense disseminated
in a very down to earth way through a combination of lectures and practical
demonstration). He had done his usual thorough job and got together a
veritable mini trade show in the car park, much appreciated both by those
attending and exhibiting - I had a super spot parked next to the main
station, with a constant stream of engines running past, even finding
time for a couple of (cold) laps of this most impressive layout.
Not having been before, I did this one as a “mini
show”, ie: me, a Stafford and a gazebo. This worked fine until the first
night. I’d decided to sleep in the van – partly because everywhere
roundabout was booked up, partly because our insurers would look dimly on a £10
000 engine being left in a gazebo overnight should it go missing. In theory
– good. In practise – not good. Woke up at three in the morning, li-lo
deflated, crick in my neck and three degrees outside. Never again! When Alan
Barsby (of MJ Engineering) casually announced the following day that they’d
had a great pub meal the night before at a place nearby which had rooms
available that night, I didn’t need to think too long about it before
throwing the engine in the van and making for a shower, pint and open fire
that evening with Alan and others.
All in all it was an excellent do, a very relaxing three
days which felt far more like a holiday than work.
It turned out to be a good few days for Stafford – the
day I left for the AGM we had a chap from America visit us at the workshop.
We’d already corresponded by email about a new engine for a railway he’s
building, having seen our offering “in the metal” he placed an order
there and then – this will be the first Stafford (although by no means the
first, or even largest, engine) we’ve air-freighted to the USA, this one
going to Kentucky. The next day, at the AGM, we took another order for an
engine for a private railway close to the EWR – by coincidence both engines
will be in blue (although different shades), the first we’ve done in this
colour.
I was searching the internet recently researching a model
locomotive built in the 1970s, several of the Google results linking to
discussion board type sites, which I hadn’t come across before. Whilst there
was some useful information, I was struck and depressed at the relentlessly
didactic nature of the posts and the general level of misanthropy, largely
hidden behind anonymous online identities.
One simple request from a man I happen to know well,
asking for contact details for Gordon Smith (he of soft-pop safety valve fame)
was met with a rude, unhelpful post to the effect that if he couldn’t make
safety valves and needed to buy them he shouldn’t be attempting model
engineering. The fact that he was actually simply asking for a spring
specification so that he could make his own valves (Gordon only produces the
designs, he doesn’t manufacture valves) was obvious to anybody who read his
original request before leaping in with a reply. The fact that wouldn’t have
been obvious from the initial question was that the man comes from a three
generation model engineering family, with many fine engines to their credit
(and were, indeed, exhibiting at Leamington Spa last week), himself generous
with his help and advice to others.
It seems about the only words you never see on these
boards is “I don’t know” – the contributors seems to be omniscient in
their outpourings. It reminds me of CB radio which was all the rage when I was
at school – lots of unattributable, anonymous voices chattering in the ether
with nothing much to say…
To take my ideas and turn them into something concrete,
we commissioned the Taylor-Kellar Partnership to develop suitable
hardware and software, then produce a pair of prototype indicators. Initial
development was done using a model beam engine (which ended up, in the
interests of testing the hardware, spending long periods running at speeds
that would have Mr Stuart Turner revolving in his grave!) before moving over
onto our Stafford demonstrator. Since many of the tests were conducted on our
rolling road, often requiring the engine to be run under heavy load at large
regulator openings with different cutoffs, brake blocks became a bit of a
consumable item!
The indicator works by recording the changing cylinder
pressure at various positions of the piston. A pressure transducer is
connected to the cylinder by a short pipe, with a reflective spot on a wheel
read by an optical sensor to give a dead centre mark from which the position
of the piston is interpolated. When we first started getting results, the
first thing you find is a) you might have thought you knew how an indicator
works, but you don’t really and, b) real indicator diagrams don’t look
that much like the “airbrushed” ones you get in books (which, in fairness,
my 1906 copy of “Hawkins Treatise of the Steam Indicator” does admit to in
small print at the back of the book).
In the early stages you get buried in a huge amount of
information, we ran around like kids in a sweet shop running engines at
different loads, speeds, watching the effect of the governor on a stationary
engine, seeing the inlet line wilt on the beam engine which we now know has
run for 25 years with an undersized steam pipe, being mystified by spikes in
the exhaust line on a locomotive until we realised it was the exhaust opening
on the other cylinder reflecting back into the cylinder under investigation…
We were even in the workshop late at night with a Stafford in steam under test
two days before the Midlands Show, when we’d really got better things to be
doing (like packing the vans…).
If you visited us at the show you will have seen the
indicator (the clean one that is, the working one having spent too long
sitting beside hot and hard-working engines to be seen in public). I had
interesting talks with a number of people involved either in new-build or
restoration work on all sizes of engines up to two foot gauge – even one
serious IMLEC contender who wanted to buy the unit off the stand.
For the time being, it remains an ongoing research
project with the prototype indicator in use in our workshop – however Paul
Kellar of TKP was in attendance on several of the days of the show, which gave
us both the chance to discuss future developments, with, given the interest
shown, the possibility of a production version in the New Year.
In the two weeks between the 7 ¼ inch gauge AGM and the
Midlands Show, Steve and I had a day out collecting a large Pacific which I
have been after for several years – to no avail until recently when a
variety of circumstances meant it became available. Part-dismantled, with an
all-up weight we could only really guess at (we settled on probably more than
three though less than four tons), more rather than less seemed a good
strategy for vehicles and equipment to do the job. We took the long wheelbase
Transit and a 7 ½ ton lorry, leaving at 7 in the morning from our workshop.
With some excellent help at the far end, where the engine had been moved close
to a large loading door, we were loaded and away in double-quick time, back
and unloaded by 6 that night.
The locomotive itself went on the bed of the truck, the tender going in the back of the van. It was loaded by ingenious use of extension forks on their fork truck, spaced to gauge whereupon the tender sat neatly on them until, tilted gently into the van, it ran in on its own. Back at home, without the benefit of long forks on our truck, we put down a pair of long ramps, hoped it wasn’t too heavy for five of us to arrest and ran it down to the ground (which was, in the end, less dramatic than expected – at some stage we’ll get it on the weigh beams, but my guess is it’s no more than half a ton).
The engine is currently stored away in the back of the
workshop, with Sam and I getting the odd Saturday or Sunday on it for the time
being – once the current batch of new-build engines are out of the workshop,
we can apply some more effort to it. The tender has become a popular lunchtime
seat, rather a stylish place to eat your sandwiches.
As I write this we’ve just got back from the Midlands Model Engineering Exhibition at the Fosse, Leamington Spa. This is a show that seems to go from strength to strength – it’s a marathon at five days for us exhibitors (we set up first thing Thursday, then do five days on the stand before pulling the whole thing down Tuesday night, aiming to get back for something to eat and bed by about 9.30) but really brings in some interesting models, with a full program of lectures and demonstrations throughout the show.
More pictures of the show, Claire's ice lolly and Steve contemplating the road
ahead
This year we hatched a plan to take a portable track on
which we could run our demonstrator Stafford up and down for the duration,
which worked very well – the idea was that anybody who wanted a go could
have a drive up and down. Steve and Sam were on hand throughout the show to
look after the engine and give guidance, we got some very positive feedback
(and another order, which was rather nice). On the last afternoon it poured
with rain, which made packing the railway up and getting it off the field in
the dark that night quite exciting (the Transit got bogged down but
Meridienne’s ever-efficient organization had a Landrover on hand to pull it
out, we still got away by 7 that night).
The word count now reads over two thousand words, I
imagine that there will be few survivors who started reading up at the top of
the page still standing at this point. It’s a clear Autumn Sunday morning
here in Metheringham, B.B.King playing gently in the background while the boys
sleep upstairs (teenagers having the capacity for about twenty hours sleep
each day). Mrs P has just headed out for bell ringing at Nocton, time for me
to get on with some work of my own in the workshop.