Going Loco - October 2020 | Didcot Railway Centre

FRIDAY 30 OCTOBER

Spooky Shunting Spectacular

It’s alive I tell you - ALIVE!

Sorry, went all horror movie on you there.

With it being the season for such things I though it would fun for you to hear about the spooky goings on at Didcot Railway Centre. As you might know, there’s a Phantom loose at the railway centre and it’s really weird. It doesn’t eat coal, it only sips at water occasionally, seems to burn a funny flavour of oil and it growls around the place making the occasional high patched scream.

What am I talking about?

Well, nothing supernatural obviously. Nope - I’m talking about our trusty workhorse No. 08 604 Phantom. While we are all about the steam locos, we do have a few resident diesels and more often than not, when something needs moving, we summon the mighty Phantom from her slumber. The British Railways Class 08 diesel Shunter that she is an example of is one of those almost unrecognised British success stories and has a history going way back to the 1930s.

The London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) built the first of the 0-6-0 DE shunter’s that were to be the first step on the road to the Class 08. They were built between 1934 and 1936. Another batch of a very similar type was built during WW2. Given the huge success of the LMS design, BR engaged the company English Electric to begin to provide some more of their diesel engine and generator sets as well as the traction motors. The new locomotives to put them in were built between 1952 and 1962 at no less than 5 of BR’s works*.

The 350 horsepower engine is a 6KT. In English Electric’s system, this means it has 6 cylinders, is of Type K and is set up for use in rail Traction. This diesel engine turns not a gearbox like a car but an electrical generator and this supplies electrical power to motors connected via some gears to the wheels. In a seeming nod to the steam locos they replaced, their driving wheels are coupled together with rods, at least giving the outward look of what has come before. These locos aren’t fast. The two versions of the gearing had either a top speed of 15mph in the Class 08 or the slightly uprated Class 09 which hit the heady heights of 20mph...

What the 08s lacked in speed, they most definitely made up for with pulling power. To put it in to terms so that we can compare it with a steam locomotive, it has a tractive effort of 35,000lbs of force. The Class 8750 0-6-0 pannier tank locomotives** that they replaced on the Western had just 22,515lbs T.E. They are even stronger than a GWR Castle which is just under 32,000lbs. Just don’t expect it to pull the Cheltenham Flyer at 80mph...

They slowly took over their assigned shunting duties from steam. This is the moving around and rearranging of railway vehicles into different formations. They did this so well that eventually 996 Class 08s were built. Along with all the other variations on this design, the grand total is around 1,200 individual machines. The way the railways have changed over the years has meant that the need for shunting has declined greatly. The vast majority of both freight and passenger trains are now of what is known as fixed formation - they stay coupled together as a set and are only rarely disconnected. However, there are still occasions where vehicles need reorganising and amazingly the Class 08 is still doing the job in the 21st Century. Although the fleet is now dwindling, there are less than 100 still in front line service, they are still there, doing the job!

Our example was built by BR at Derby in 1959. She was originally numbered D3771 - the D prefix being used while steam locomotives were still around to denote a diesel. The renumbering scheme brought about by T.O.P.S. (the Total Operations Processing System) saw the class designated as Class 08 (the first two digits of her number) and then followed by her individual designation 604. She wound up at Tyseley under the care of a certain Mr Simon Grego (one of our volunteers) and one of the things he did was to be party to repainting her in to a pseudo GWR colour scheme and added the name Phantom.*** Later, she managed to shear one of her crank pins and the cost of the repair, lack of work and her age lead to her being withdrawn. Thankfully she was subsequently purchased for preservation. The then owner needed to have somewhere for the locomotive to live and Simon came to the rescue in suggesting Didcot as the ideal home.

Upon arrival at Didcot, the damage was repaired and a fair amount of work including rewiring in places was undertaken to reanimate the Phantom. She then kept doing what she has always done - shunting. So successful was she at her new preservation role that when the loan agreement ended, she was purchased and now has a permanent home with us at Didcot. She has had a number of liveries over the years including black, War Department black (with the wonderful number WD 40!), BR lined green and most recently, Phantom has received the famous BR rail blue livery, enabling the centre to tell another part of the story of the railways in the former GWR area.

Love them or not, you can’t help but admire the Class 08 350hp diesel shunter and it’s derivatives. There are no less than about 80 that are now classed as preserved making it the most numerous class in British preservation by some margin. They are a classic design and a quiet triumph of British engineering. Railway history, the U.K. preservation scene and indeed Didcot Railway Centre wouldn’t be the same without them. Even if us steam guys still can’t work out where the coal goes.

Nearly 90 years after those first few LMS examples rolled out the factory gates, these unsung heroes are still doing their unglamorous job. You might say that their presence still haunts the railway to this day...

*These were Horwich, Doncaster, Derby, Darlington and Crew.

**Like our residents Nos. 3650 and 3738.

*** She had a fellow classmate that was also put into a steam era livery, this was No. 08 601 which was given the similarly spooky name Spectre and turned out in an LMS style paint scheme.

FRIDAY 23 OCTOBER

Another Tender Behind

Yes, I went there with the title.

Again...

Anyway, we had a look at the tenders used up to the start of the Churchward era last time and we saw the birth of the standardisation era.* The amazing thing about this was that there were always more engines than there were tenders. Tenders were easier to overhaul and even had their own works - ‘J’ shop at Swindon - where they were maintained. When a loco went in for overhaul therefore, the tender was separated off and went for assessment and work there. When an engine was completed, the very next available tender of the correct type was then coupled up. It goes some way to explaining why, especially on tender locomotives that had long service lives like our own No. 5322 and No. 4079 Pendennis Castle, why photographs of them show quite a bit of variation in their partner vehicles.

The Churchward 3,500 gallon version that we began to describe last time became a mainstay of many classes and was widely produced. There were a whole heap of updates to it over the years. The changes to the side frames were mentioned last time but the tank wasn’t. The coal flare or fender (both terms are used) got progressively longer over time until it reached its final form as shown on all the other 3,500 gallon tenders in our collection. You can tell the difference in the age of the tanks. The earlier ones have flush riveting and the later ones (post 1917) have snap head rivets (the domed kind) which are easier, cheaper and faster to do. There was a war on... No. 7808 Cookham Manor has the earlier flush riveted tank and both Nos. 5322 and 3822 have the later snap head style rivets.

The next type of tender represented at Didcot is the 4,000 gallon. There are two original types of this tender with third type being replicated. There was a first try at building 4,000 gallon tenders at Swindon in the late Dean / Early Churchward period but the instigation of the water trough network meant that only 20 were constructed between 1900 and 1904. As the bigger 4-6-0s got, well, bigger, a renewed interest in larger tenders was shown by Collett in 1926. After this time, the 4,000 gallon tender eventually became the norm for engines such as the Castles, Kings, Halls, 47XXs and Stars.

The more numerous 4,000 gallon tender in our collection is the Collett version. This takes the previous GWR design and extends the tank sides upwards to increase the water capacity. The coal fender, despite still retaining some of the design cues of the previous vehicles, now goes all the way down both sides and around the back too. This meant that rather pleasingly, the cab sides of the big 4-6-0s lined up with the tender tops and gave a much more pleasing ‘flow’ to their overall design. They originally had two water fillers (one either side at the back) as the platform water cranes were not tall enough to reach right over to the centre position. Upgrades to the columns meant that a central filler was soon adopted as standard.

The other 4,000 gallon design present in the collection is the Hawksworth version. This is a very different beast to all previous tenders. Although in silhouette it could pass as a Collett version, 5 seconds of inspection shows it clearly isn’t! The sides are absolutely flat. Not because they have been flush riveted but because they are welded. Another wartime expedience. There is no rolled over top edge, no other shaping at all in fact! The first 30 were oddities as they were built to be 6” wider than any other GWR tender. This is because these tenders were used exclusively with the (then) new 10XX County Class 4-6-0s. They had a wider cabs and so these tenders were made wider to meet them. They became extinct when the last of the County Class engines they served was scrapped in the 1960s. Of course, the new No. 1014 will need one of these and it is under construction in Didcot’s Locomotive works.

There was however a standard width (8’ for those that need to know) version that was built and used by initially the late era Halls and Castles although, once they were in the tender pool, they were used by all the locos that were eligible for them. The one we have at Didcot is rather appropriately matched to our Modified Hall No. 6998 Burton Agnes Hall. As a Hawksworth locomotive that was actually built in 1949 (a British Rail Loco from beginning to end), this paints exactly the right picture! There is some possibility that this tender is the only fully original Hawksworth tender left as the vast majority (if not all? - corrections on this point welcome!) of the other preserved examples have had new tanks made and fitted.

That gets us to the end of the GWR tender story that we can tell at Didcot. There are a few preserved examples of the Collett 3,000 gallon version about but not in our collection. It wouldn’t be right however to end without mentioning some of the real oddball tenders that, while not preserved, crop up from time to time in period photographs.

The obvious first place to go is to mention the few tenders that were converted as part of the Post WW2 oil firing (using oil burners instead of coal) experiment. This quickly resulted in the realisation of two things. 1)That oil firing and GWR copper fireboxes weren’t a great mix and 2)that a ‘financially iffy’ post WW2 Great Britain had nowhere near the kind of finances to power its locomotives on expensive oil...

As well as the oil firing experiment there was also a 4,000 gallon unit built with an aluminium alloy tank - presumably to mitigate corrosion but this possibly also fell into the ‘well expensive’ side of things and was not repeated.

There were two 8 wheel GWR tenders. The first was built to accompany the GWR’s only Pacific (4-6-2) locomotive No. 111 The Great Bear. Presumably, this elongated 3,500 gallon unit with two four wheeled bogies underneath was thought necessary on visual grounds alone. The then standard Churchward one would have looked a little diminutive alongside a whopping great loco!

The second 8 wheeler was as an experiment by Collett in 1931. This one looks for all the world like a really convincing photoshop job when it crops up. It used all the same components as the regular Collett 4,000 gallon version but just had more wheels. it wasn’t repeated but as it used all standard parts in the main, it lasted pretty much until the end of steam on the Western Region.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. The GWR also built a few short tenders for use on tender locomotives that operated in areas where there were a lot of short turntables. The 80 vehicles were phased out as larger turntables were installed and can best be described as looking cute.

Awwww, bless...

There were also self - weighing tenders that were filled with all sorts of measuring gear so that coal consumption of locomotives on test could be measured.

The final word on tenders probably has to go to the ex. R.O.D. 2-8-0 tenders that, after the WW1 war surplus engines they were built for were scrapped, entered into normal circulation for some classes. One example of this was the 2251 Class ‘Collett Goods’ engines - a diminutive 0-6-0 freight loco. This meant that there was a forty three ton loco pulling a forty SEVEN ton tender! Talk about the tail wagging the dog - that engine really did have a tender behind.

That’s it, I can’t do that joke any more.

I’m off...

*Disclaimer: Again - I KNOW that I am really skimming the surface here. Just pointing out the basics. There is a LOT more to it than this blog can or indeed should hold. If you need more, (and why not?!) there is an excellent ongoing study here which really gets into the nitty-gritty.

http://www.gwr.org.uk/no-tenders.html

FRIDAY 16 OCTOBER

A Tender Behind!

I know.

The title.

Couldn’t resist it.

So, tenders. There is always a whole bunch of stuff to be said about the locomotives that pull them but the tenders seem to get a bit of a raw deal. These fascinating vehicles have their own unique and varied history and deserve a little of the limelight as well. So, in the first of a two-parter, pull on the overalls and pick up the inspection lamp and we will go and have a look!*

The vast majority of early locomotives were tender engines. Simply because it’s more convenient to carry your coal and water supply on a separate vehicle rather than on the main chassis of the locomotive itself. Indeed, Trevithick’s early 19th Century prototypes were tender engines. The basics of these early vehicles are wonderfully illustrated by Stephenson’s Rocket. A simple wooden 4-wheeled truck with a flat area that you can put the fuel on and a large barrel, turned on it’s side to put the water in. Simpler times...

Replica Fire Fly in action on the Broad Gauge demonstration line

Looking forward to the earliest (albeit replica) versions in the Didcot collection, we come to the broad gauge versions. You can see the development between that of Rocket to Firefly and Iron Duke. The size of the tank is much larger and is of a riveted construction. The engines were consuming a lot more water as they became more powerful. They also were burning more fuel, hence the general increase in size. The basic shape is one that went through the whole of GWR tender development - in fact many of the design cues on Firefly can be traced through to almost the last GWR tenders built. Features that made it through include the rolled over top edge to the tank sides - although this was radically altered over the years - and the six axle configuration.

Features to note here include the sandwich type construction of the frames. This is an early railway technique where to ensure the strength of the materials, two plates of metal are sandwiched either side of a fairly serious lump of timber. The tank is a fair bit narrower than the frames with a lip around the outside. Some times this lip had the leaf springs above them and sometimes the springs were in / on the frames below. Some even had a small hutch type structure on them in which the train’s guard sat. It must have been exciting to ride there! Unbelievably this isn’t the most scary thing about the originals. That is that the handbrake on these vehicles were quite often the ONLY brake on the train.

Oh, and the brake blocks were wooden.

And on one side of the tender only...

Iron Duke class ‘Lightning’ showing the ‘iron coffin’ on back of the tender where a travelling porter sat looking backwards to watch the train for any signs of a mishap

The rivetted construction of the tender water tanks can be clearly seen on the replica Iron Duke; pictured here during a tender repaint.

We have a bit of a gap in the preservation story here as the oldest preserved GWR standard gauge tender locomotive** is the National Collection’s wonderful Dean Goods No. 2516. The 2,500 gallon tender preserved with this loco is noteworthy on our journey. It is a product of the William Dean era at Swindon and tenders of this era were often constructed with coal rails. These are exactly what they sound like - a metal cage structure that is used to hold the coal in! Later on these were replaced with the now familiar GWR style ‘flare’ section of flat steel plate and the short example shown on this vehicle is typical of the era. Again, many of the features from the broad gauge follow through including the tender tank being significantly narrower than the frames but times were a changing.

Early stage of construction of 2999’s tender tank. Note the well for extra water capacity between the wheels

Our next example comes in the form of the recreation of our Saint class Locomotive No. 2999 Lady of Legend. The Churchward era brought a whole new idea to Swindon - Standardisation. As far as was possible Mr Churchward tried to make as many components as interchangeable. Tenders are an obvious place to look. They are a separate vehicle attached to the locomotive after all! Tender No. 1719 was originally built in 1906 but oddly it’s frames were later replaced with a more modern set and the tank was rebuilt back to its original version for the Saint Project so its a bit of a mix. Probably not much there that dates back to 1906 any more but technically it is registered as having been built in the right time period so, we’ll take it! For serious nerd points, it’s the angles of the plate work where the axle boxes and springs are mounted that give the game away. Narrow plate work = early, wider plate work = late.

2999 and tender part way through (re)construction

The tank has been recreated to look as much like the original as possible and is a huge credit to Peter Gransden and Ali Matthews who built it. It might look like there are no rivets holding it together but there are. HUNDREDS of them. These early tenders were all flush riveted. The process is to drill a countersunk hole on the front. Insert your red hot rivet from behind the plate and then flatten the protruding stem into the countersink. Then you have to grind it flat to blend in with the sides. Imagine the hours of work in this job alone...

2999’s water tank with baffles fitted. Ali Matthews, who built it, standing in the tank

The tank now is almost as wide as the frames leaving just a small lip around the edge. A rolled top is in evidence as is the flare - in its original shorter Dean style but scaled up to fit the new larger 3,500 gallon design. To increase the water capacity, there is a well which protrudes down through the frames. The filler is in the centre, at the rear. The other important feature here is the step structure at the front of the tender. In order to make these tenders truly interchangeable with locomotives of different heights, there were different designs of this shovelling plate to suit specific classes.

2999's tender with the coal sheets fitted

Like the Dean Goods, No. 2999’s tender has its own vacuum brake system and the handbrake for the engine is on the left or fireman’s side of the cab. The other large handle is to operate the water scoop - a subject of a previous blog for you to discover! There are two smaller handles, either side of the coal space. These are the water valves and start the water flowing from the tender to the injectors to be pushed from there into the boiler. There is also a small vacuum valve here that can be turned to allow air into the tender brake system.

The finished locomotive - complete with the all-important tender

Well, that’s enough for now - in part two we will look at the tender designs of Mr Collett and Mr Hawksworth as well as a few of the oddities produced down the years. Like much of the engineering on our locos - they can talk to you and tell you a story if you know how to read it. Your next lesson in how to speak tender will be next week...

*Disclaimer: I KNOW that I am really skimming the surface here. Just pointing out the basics. There is a LOT more to it than this blog can or indeed should hold. If you need more, there is an excellent ongoing study here which really gets into the nitty-gritty.

http://www.gwr.org.uk/no-tenders.html

**Some parts of the Bluebell Railway’s ‘Dukedog’ No. 9017 possibly come from earlier GWR tender locos but as this is only the cab and the boiler it’s not a pure survival like the Dean Goods. The tender is a later version too...

FRIDAY 9 OCTOBER

Hydrostatic Hyperbole?

It’s time we talked about hydrostatic displacement lubrication. Please don’t run away - this is really quite interesting! In fact this a fascinating piece of equipment that is vital to the operation of the majority of our steam locomotives but it is something that the average visitor never really realises the significance of. So, let’s warm up the spanners and take a dive into the works shall we?

Hydrostatic displacement lubrication relies on a very simple scientific principle that almost everyone knows. Oil floats on water. This is due to density. The measurement of density is its “mass per unit volume”. Do not be frightened by the sudden outbreak of physics. Let us explain. You may have heard of the old trick question:

“What is heavier - a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?”

The answer is of course that they both weigh the same (1 ton! Who got that wrong?) but there will be a fundamental difference in the size of each of those loads. In our imaginary ton of bricks there will only be relatively few bricks compared to the probably tens of thousands of feathers needed to make the same weight, or more accurately, mass. A much bigger load. So there is a lot more of the stuff that makes up bricks in a brick than there is of the stuff that makes up feathers in a feather. We measure the amount of stuff a substance by measuring its mass (physics uses kilograms these days). We then define how much space the object is taking up. This is its volume (using centimetres cubed for solids and millilitres for liquids*). Divide the mass by the volume and you get the density of the mass per unit volume. See? It’s not so scary! So, for a millilitre of water there is more of the stuff that makes up water than the amount stuff that makes up oil in a millilitre of oil. That is why the oil floats on the water. It is less dense.

So what has this impromptu physics lesson got to do with steam engines and lubricators? When we last spoke about lubrication, we found out that there were two types of oil. The thinner general lubricating oil and the thicker steam oil. It’s the thicker stuff, that looks a bit like green golden syrup, that we need to deliver to the moving parts where the hostile steam filled environment exists. This is the regulator, valves and cylinders at the front of the engine. In the cab of an engine there is a big brass container of the stuff and it has pipes going into it and pipes coming out of it.

The pipes coming in do so via a strange thing, usually mounted on the cab roof that either looks like a heater bar or a ring off a cooker. They are not heaters - think about where the firebox is... They are in fact condensers. The steam from the boiler is turned back into water by having to travel through this long, winding and uninsulated pipe. It however, remains at boiler pressure. This water is fed into the big brass container and because oil floats on water, the water is at the bottom and the oil is on top. There are a number of galleries or passages that the oil is forced through when the steam pressure is applied and the amount of water in the container increases.

The galleries are also connected to the glass tubes at the front of the brass container. There can be as many as five glasses on GWR engines. Each glass tube has a tap near it and a cone type structure inside it. As the water comes into the container and pushes on the oil, some of the oil is forced up through these cones. As it is working, the oil will drip upwards through the sight glass. The tap controls how fast the drips go a though the cone and therefore how fast the oil is delivered to the front end.

You will also notice that the some of the steam pipes go through a valve that is connected to the regulator lever (the big red ‘accelerator’ control, via a mechanical linkage. This is called the jockey valve and means that the oil isn’t wasted as it only flows when the regulator is open. It does give us a problem though. What if we are going along but the steam is shut off - what we call ‘coasting’? We might coast for a long distance and that means no oil flows and that is not great for the valves and cylinders...

Well, when you move a regulator, you notice that there is a little bit of what feels like slack in the mechanism. The handle moves a bit and then sort of ‘bites’ and opens the regulator valve. When they want to coast, a GWR engine driver will shut the regulator lever right down but then they do a strange thing and lift it up again just slightly. This is enough movement to open the jockey valve but not open the regulator valve - clever stuff, right?!

When the pressure is on the oil it is forced from the lubricator to the front end. You can trace the pipes from the sight glasses to where they disappear under the cladding (the thin metal outer case that holds the insulation on the boiler). These pipes then travel under the lagging to keep things warm. The hotter this thick oil is, the easier it flows. These pipes come up from under the lagging at the front end of the boiler, goes through a series of shut off taps under a small cover** and then dive into the smokebox. These oil pipes then deliver the oil into the steam flow coming from the boiler. It passes through an atomiser and it is carried from there, in the steam, to the moving parts. The number of sight glasses was updated over the years and if you see a locomotive with just one cover on the driver’s side of the smokebox it has a 3 glass lubricator, if it has a second, smaller one on the fireman’s side them it has a 5 glass lubricator. Nerdy fact that one!***

So, if this system is so good, why don’t all of the GWR locomotives have a hydrostatic displacement lubricator? Well, this system is really great as it gives a very fine degree of control to the driver over the oil supply. For most of the first half of the 20th Century, when the GWR fitted superheaters to their engines they did so using just a low degree of superheat. There were a maximum of just two rows of superheater elements in the boiler and the lower resulting steam temperatures involved give you a bit more leeway in oil control. However, when the poor post war coal meant that some locos began to be fitted with three and even four row superheaters (like our own No. 6023 King Edward II), there was a growing concern that the drivers might not supply enough oil to match the increased temperatures that their steads now operated at. As a result, mechanical lubricators were fitted to the running plates of the engines and as these are driven by the locomotive mechanism as it moves, the rate of oil flow is taken out of the hands of the driver completely.

The drivers were not all behind this decision. It was quite common for a GWR driver, when faced with an engine that was running in a sluggish manner, to turn up the level of oil flow to the front end and this could result in a marked improvement in the running qualities of the machine. Indeed, when the first two post war Castle Class engines were built with three row superheaters, they were fitted with hydrostatic displacement lubricators. They were regarded as powerful and free running but when they and the subsequent post war Castles were fitted with mechanical lubrication, their reputation with some crews were not as good. The debate about the merits of both systems carry on to this day.

Wherever the truth lies, the hydrostatic displacement lubricator remains a both a singularly very clever and mostly unsung piece of locomotive engineering. So, the next time you are at Didcot, have a look and see it you can see one of these fine pieces of equipment. Ask our drivers about them and take a moment to marvel at it. It’s really quite amazing. Let’s hear it for the hydrostatic displacement lubricator!

PS: Your blogger was asked about his personal mass per unit volume while writing this. He declined to comment...

*You might remember from your science lessons that 1ml of a liquid is the same volume as 1 cubic centimetre. While we don’t use the metric system a great deal in the works, this is really handy for doing physics!

**For some unknown reason, the myth is that the little blister style covers for the oil pipes and valves are there to hide the superheater. No - a superheater is a massive thing. It bolts to the front of the boiler and fills a reasonable proportion of the smokebox and the boiler tubes. It does not need covering. It’s inside. Pre-covered. The little covers are just there to tidy up the look of oil pipes and valves. This is the second time we have mentioned this but this myth is really persistent. We are here to both entertain and educate!

***This argument is null and void when you have an engine with a mechanical lubricator. It’s a big box thing on the running plate with loads of pipes on - you can’t miss it!

FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER

The Return of the Champion - Chapter 1

It’s time to come clean. One of your blog writers here has another duty at Didcot Railway Centre. For a number of years, I have had the unbelievable privilege of looking after one of the Great Western Society’s most precious and famous residents. None other than No. 4079 Pendennis Castle. As you may or may not know, we repatriated the locomotive from Australia in 2000* and in 2001 we slowly took the engine to pieces, intending it to be restored to running order. Yours truly showed up a short time after and once I earned my laurels, I was given the job of looking after the engine. It’s been a long road, a great deal of work has been done already and there is light now at the end of the tunnel (pun intended). For the first of these semi - regular updates, we will take a look at the at some of what has been done already and what the latest updates are.

Photo taken on 7 August 2018

The whole engine was basically complete upon return but also had a few ‘extras’. There were a number of Australian fittings including electric lamp brackets, air brake fittings and most notably what seemed like half of the iron red sand of the Pilbara! It was only relatively recently that the last of this was ejected into the bin, discovered as a thin red haze on the last few untouched bits...

The engine has been right down to the frames. It has meant that we have peered into every corner of this mighty machine and it has needed a lot of work to get us to where we are today. The boiler - quite often the bete noir of many loco restoration project - was pretty good. No. 4079 was fed a diet of de-mineralised water upon her arrival in the Pilbara. Rio Tinto needed it to prevent the desert water from ruining their mining equipment. Also, when they finished running her, the Australian crew emptied her boiler out. The desert heat did the rest.

Inside Pistons

It required some work on the stays - the crown stays in particular - seam and foundation ring rivets and of course a complete re-tube. The frames and mechanical items were sadly a much different story. The structure of the engine and the tender under the cab was pretty much life expired. As this forms the drag box (the bit that connects the two vehicles together and transmits the pulling force of the loco to the train), we were keen that this was a good as possible. A total replacement of the metal here was undertaken with just the main frames and two complex (and thankfully reusable!) pressings remaining. Her front buffer beam was also twisted and a great deal of effort was expended in straightening this out too.

4079 Drag Box

There isn’t much mechanically that hasn’t been overhauled. The wear in the bearing surfaces in some cases was twice the scrapping size. Oil and red desert sand mixing together make terrible lubricant but amazing grinding paste... All the whitemetal bearings have been refreshed or renewed and the cylinder and valve liners are also new with pistons and valves machines to suit.

Valve Liner

A number of features required a bit of reversion back to her original specification. The injectors that No. 4079 went to Australia with don’t like hot water and as you can imagine, a tender tank of water in the desert gets pretty warm, pretty quickly. They were replaced with some injectors that were far less susceptible to this problem. We replaced them with two GWR live steam units. Not entirely authentic (she should have a live and an exhaust injector**) but more so than the Gresham and Craven units as supplied!

4079 Crank Axle

The other ‘start from scratch’ area was the cylinder drain cocks. These little valves are on the bottom of the cylinders and steam chest. These are opened as an engine stands still and remain open for the first couple of revolutions of the wheels to drain the water out of the cylinders. Hence the big whooosh when a steam engine moves off. Water is incompressible unlike steam and if you have too much of it in there your cylinders go bang in a really expensive way. There are 11 of these and they had all been replaced with steam operating versions from an unknown source before she left the U.K. in the 1970s. The GWR ones are operated via a single lever and a mechanical linkage. Now, casting, machining and grinding in these valves are all technical tasks. Getting all 11 to line up and open together took the patience requirement a stage further...

Cylinder Liners

We had the majority of the work on the frames and boiler completed and we reunited them in order to make sure that we had all the bits we needed. The loco had been in bits for a number of years and this we felt was important to ensure that there were no delays that might unnecessarily burn up vital boiler ticket time. A lot of very fiddly and unexciting but very vital jobs got sorted in this time. Just before the lockdown of 2020 started, we had decided to make the final push towards removing the boiler for completion and commissioning.

Connecting Rod

We had everything to the boiler cladding released and ready to come off. Then it’s just a case of the cab roof and boiler out! And that’s when lockdown hit.

For various medical reasons concerning my other half, I was promptly locked into my flat for the next 4 months...

Thankfully, my great friends in the loco works were able to come back to Didcot a lot sooner than I was. They took the cladding sheets and cab roof off and then lifted the boiler, placing it on BR WELTROL No. 901002. Work has now commenced on doing the last few jobs and making it fully pressure tight. I finally made it back to Didcot on the 1st August.

Team fitting Drain Cocks

Despite the fact that the workforce size has been limited, progress has been great. As soon as there is something more to report, I’ll write another blog with a little engine history, a few jobs we have done before and where we are at the moment.

Best Wishes,

Drew and the 4079 Team.