Good progress today on several projects.
We were fortunate to have Geoff Cross come in to deliver Personal Track Safety training to some of the team. Geoff is the official training officer for the Railway. Most of our Operational team have had this important training now, which should hopefully help keep them safe when they are out and about on the line.
D1010. The loco has had the fuel system connected up. Several parts were brought from store today for fitting. Martin was busy connecting up a temporary fuel system in order to test the engine in a few weeks. More wiring work is required. The engine oil is now on order and the pre-heaters have been run for the first time in several years successfully. More good news to follow in the coming weeks. Bob Clegg is busy building up another engine off site for future use in the Western.
D7017. Andy was busy working on several fuel pipe connections today which had shown signs of wear. Andy also made up some new brackets as can be seen below.
D7018. Martin and Simon were busy working on the transmission unit today. Inside the loco we have started a job to re-locate the start contactors and Battery switch nearer the batteries in the boiler room. The aim of this is to reduce having to run massive long lengths of very thick cable from the batteries all the way to the cubicle. A similar modification has been done on D7017.
Class 08 D3462. More fun and games today. Last week you may recall we were having some problems with a leaking radiator element in the cooler group at the front of the loco. Unfortunately we were unable to sort it last week, it started leaking again just when we thought we had it at the end of the day! This week we took the second of the two oil cooler elements off as well the original leaking one. It appeared both were leaking. We managed to fit a non-leaking element up, and following several variations on the gasket joint the radiator element passed the long run up test. The oil feed to the other side is currently blanked off, we didn't have time to test another element to fit there. The loco is required for shunting later this week at Williton, so it was decided it was best to leave the loco in a runnable state this week with a view to fitting another element up next week in position two!
03119. The loco is still undergoing a repaint, as can be seen with Roy having a go.
Graham, Paul, Mike and others were busy sorting out things that are no longer required today. We are currently having a review of the way we store things and whether we actually need certain components.
