14/12/25 – Cuthbert and some Turkey

Hello and welcome; this week we have been busy with the Tanks, the Lowfit, and a vacuum cylinder, in between celebrating and some festive feasting.
Nick is recovering (on light duties) this week after an operation; however it didn’t stop him celebrating his Birthday with Cuthbert the Caterpillar.

Saturday, James and myself used paint removal discs to clean off the white paint from the tyres of tank 3854. A coat of black was then applied.

Charlie & Ernie meanwhile made a start making a blanking plate for the repaired 21″ vacuum cylinder so that we could pressure test the cylinder repairs. The plate was cut, the edges ground up, mounting holes marked and drilled out. A centre hole was also drilled ready for the pressure fitting.

The cylinder studs were run down with a die-nut to clean the threads and a boss was welded to the plate to take the pressure fitting.

Once the sun had raised the temperature a bit, I was able to start applying the running numbers to tank 3621.

James applied a coat of black to the Owners plates for tanks 3606 and 3621.

On Sunday, Ernie, Charlie and Ross fitted the air test gauge and pipe to the blanking plate, then the plate was bolted to the vacuum dome using an old rubber cylinder seal in the joint.

The air supply from Edward was coupled via a valve; then raising the pressure slowly to around 20psi and using some washing up liquid solution, we were able to see a couple of pin-hole leaks in the weld repair around the top of the dome. These were ground back and re-welded.

Mark, Tom, Harry and Oliver continued with the Lowfit scraping and needle gunning work started last week.

I busied myself with some solebar lettering on tank 3621.

Sunday lunchtime, and our Chefs Mark & Tom treated us all to some festive Turkey & Duck baguettes, with trimmings of course.

Followed by crackers!

After a rather extended lunch-break, work continued with some red oxide being applied to the areas cleaned up on the Lowfit.

A coupe of final jobs were attended to on tank 3606, including securing the new brake rigging split pins, removing the operating link from the redundant vacuum cylinder and securing the cylinder to prevent rotation by making and fitting bracket between the cylinder and the underframe. Once the vacuum release chords are fitted, tank 3606 will be ready for handover to the C&W Department for final inspection before entering traffic.