July News Part 5

Great Eastern Railway 1899 4 Wheel Brake Third 853

The focus has continued to be on the underframe. Many of the brackets that were mentioned last week have been painted and a reasonable number of them fitted to the underframe. As they are sometimes in different places lots of new holes have had to be drilled which has been fairly time consuming. Despite the underframe being 118 years old the metal is still tough! The brackets that are being fitted are for the brake rigging and vacuum cylinder. Other mechanical items such as the drawgear continue to receive coats of paint ready for fitting.

British Railways 1959 Brake Corridor Composite E21224

The windows continue to be prepared for refitting. Several frames are now having their sliding windows refitted into them.

A few days have also been spent manufacturing brand new wooden window surrounds to clamp the glass in place.

British Railways 1956 Tourist Second Open E4236

This week has seen some small and boring "snagging" jobs hoovered up to prepare the coach for its departure. Some of the more visual tasks have included repainting the floors in the vestibule areas, and picking out white lettering on the various plates etc that are fixed to the corridor ends. The corridor ends themselves are now both complete and have been repainted gloss black to freshen them up.

British Railways 1958 Covered Carriage Truck M94125

This van has now entered service again and is back on the end of the main coaching stock set, it certainly looks a lot nicer than it did when it came in!

British Railways 1960 Covered Carriage Truck E94464

In a deviation from our original 2017 works programme, the railway's other CCT, E94464, has been brought back into works for a "Bronze" standard overhaul. This is so it can supplement the recently out-shopped M94125 (see above) and so we can go back to the original system that was in use a few years back, when there were two CCT's in use during the summer services with a bike/buggy van on the end of each of the two sets.

Whilst mechanically fully operational, the vehicle is cosmetically in very bad condition sadly, the reason it was withdrawn from service in the first place! Given the limited time and resources available, we will not be able to work miracles, however some of the patched over corrosion will be improved and the doors made to work again. So far a start has been made of swapping some of the doors with spares we have, and a few of the patches have been ripped off by a swarm of Monkey's!

Southern Railway 1951 Parcels & Miscellaneous Van 1476

The Holt end of the vehicle has been sanded back ready to receive its resin coats.

Colman's 1908 Mustard Van 4807

The ends that were undercoated have now been gloss painted up at Holt.

Hurst Nelson 1942 4 Wheel Tank 1982

No progress to report.