Great Eastern Railway 1899 4 Wheel Brake Third 853
No progress to report
British Railways 1959 Brake Corridor Composite E21224
The five sliding compartment doors which have featured regularly over the past month have reached completion stage and are now stored to await fitting when the carriage is ready to receive them. They look a-door-able and all of the hard work put in by our volunteers Peter L, Peter W and Derek now shows as they glow with their fresh varnish.
The final two sliding examples are now all that remain of the large stack of internal doors to refurbish. This includes the door that separates the guard/luggage van from the passenger corridor, and the one which is at the extreme end of the coach in the Holt end vestibule. The latter is more advanced and only requires one or two more coats of varnish to finish, whilst the former is still being sanded and will soon join the varnish "process", although the falling temperatures are making this task difficult now.
Most of the steel ironmongery mentioned last time has now been stripped and has been painted in primer.
British Railways 1959 Tourist Second Open M4843
Welding work on the Sheringham end continues. About half of the framework repairs have now been covered back up with the application of new paneling which is finally returning the more normal shape/appearance to the end, but there is still a fair way to go...
The interior continues to move forwards steadily, which is appropriate as the pace of the coach's progress is being dictated by the welding work, so there is plenty of time to reassemble the interior at leisure. This situation has allowed us to dedicate particular tasks to individuals to complete over several weeks. This isn't always possible due to time constraints but it is nice for some volunteer staff to be able to pick up exactly where they left off the previous week. One example of this is the repainting of the interior window trims, which are painted brown because underneath they are smoke damaged (a long story relating to its previous BR life) which means that unless they are replaced, they can never be varnished. One of our many Daves has been doing these and has completed the Holt end saloon and was working this week on the Sheringham end windows.
Reassembly of the Holt end saloon is continuing during weekends with the aim of getting it to the same stage as the Sheringham end, pictured:
The Holt end was behind due to the amount of metalwork required, however much paneling is now back in place with the seating due to follow. Various small repairs have been required along the way as various items have either been damaged when stripped out, or long standing damage has been discovered now that they are in component form! Do not be fooled by the messy appearance, this is because as the coach gets more and more finished inside, all the bits awaiting refit get compressed into a smaller and smaller space!
British Railways 1957 Composite Corridor M15997
Not a coach mentioned very often, the only Mark 1 Corridor Composite (CK) on the railway. It has been in storage since the 1990's and normally resides at Holt awaiting its turn for eventual Gold overhaul. It is part of the railway's long term carriage strategy, so we don't normally do much with it at all. Sadly, earlier this week it was attacked by vandals but luckily this was limited to just graffiti. The NNR does not tolerate any graffiti on any of its structures, land or rolling stock, so in common with previous attacks over the years, this artwork was removed almost immediately.
The only snag was that it needs to be chemically removed as soon as possible before the paint goes too hard, and this had to be done in pretty atrocious conditions - think sideways snow, brought to us on a plate via a stiff North Sea wind! However, a team nevertheless got all of the graffiti off and the coach can now be returned to storage (incidentally, this is the third time it has been sprayed, the artists seem to like this one!).
As was commented later in the week, it shows that carriage restoration isn't all about being tucked away in a nice warm carriage shed!
British Railways 1958 Class 101 Railcar Driving Trailer Second Lavatory M56352
The vehicle is in service (tomorrow) for just one more day before it rests for winter. What this will then allow us to do is to dismantle a large batch of seat backs (rather than just bits and bobs) for reupholstery. Then we shall be cooking on gas, or should I say diesel because the good thing about this vehicle is that it has a diesel heater (rather than steam heat), which means potentially we can have heat whilst inside fitting or dismantling seats... We probably won't be short of volunteers for that job!
British Railways 1960 Covered Carriage Truck E94464
The seaward side of the underframe, mentioned last time, has now progressed into undercoat. It will be held now in undercoat and will not be painted in gloss topcoat until all of the dusty messy preparation work has been done to the sides.
The landward side of the underframe is now all that remains for this long and tedious job. So far, we have made it about a third of the way down on cleaning it up.
Bodywork welding repairs to the bodysides has now been completed (yay!) including all of the incredibly rotten windows.
The final task for the bodysides was to weld on some reinforcing straps which are to do with the hinged end doors which close backwards.
With bodysides now whole again, Phil has been able to turn his attention to finishing off some of the corrosion at the bottoms of the doors. The doors were dealt with (in the main) whilst the vehicle was in the staging, however some of the rotten door bottoms were held back and are being done now as access from floor level is so much easier for that particular task.
Southern Railway 1939 Parcels & Miscellaneous Van 1359
The original purpose of bringing this van indoors was to simply empty it so that it could be used by another department as a store. This has now been achieved after two weeks of sorting, throwing out and moving of components onto our new mezzanine floor facility. The latter, incidentally, is now FULL, in the proper sense. We kept being asked how many more wheelbarrows of stuff could disappear up there(!) but we knew we had a few shelves kept back for this wagon. Alas, now it truly is full, so there will no more updates along the lines of "this vehicle is being emptied onto the mezzanine".
However, with the van inside, the M&GN volunteer team have decided to give it some super-accelerated cosmetic attention and a repaint (this is the reason there is not really an update for GER 853 this time). True to their word, they descended on it like a swarm of bees with up to half a dozen men on it at times. Various pieces of rotten planking have been chopped out and repair pieces temporarily spliced in and sealed in.
The windows have been re-framed where required and re-sealed, to try and hamper any water ingress. The whole vehicle (sides and ends) was then sanded down and all loose paint removed. The sides then received a coat of resin to seal the exposed wood. Countless other smaller repairs have also been done to the body to keep it going as a store until such a time as it comes in to be "done properly". Because this vehicle fits nicely on one shed road sharing with CCT E94464, it will be in long enough to be repainted before it has to be dispatched. The van has carried several liveries in its running life, one of which has to be chosen as its colour until it comes back in. We shall have to see what left-over paint we have in stock, but I have noticed that there are very few of these PMV vans in preservation carrying BR Blue...
The restoration work has been solely in the hands of volunteers, however it has been decided that it would be worth the company's (NNR's) while if a little investment was made to the mechanics. Two days have been spent assessing, adjusting and repairing the vacuum brake system, to change the vehicle's status from "loose or cripple" to "fitted". What this actually means is that previously the vehicle had only ever been used as a static store at Weybourne, so its brake system had never been connected or used (or even looked at) and in the rare event the vehicle had to be moved it was considered as unbraked and therefore had to have a guards van sandwiched behind it, complete with guard. This is labour intensive if it has to be moved, so we have put its own vacuum brakes back into service so that if it needs to be moved now it can be done more like a normal coach i.e. attach an engine to it and just go. This was not without work: we were very lucky in that all the pipework and components were there and did indeed work when we tested it. However there were three leaks to find and repair, perishable components such as hoses and seals to replace, linkages to adjust and finally various tests to undertake to prove the vehicle's safe before putting it onto the "fitted" register.
Workshop
Finally, the Axeman's latest work has been a return to the steel workshop crates which will be stackable, and the frames of the prototype are fast reaching a recognisable form.
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