Friday 19 August 2016

Troughing makes you hungry!

Tuesday16th

Four of us spent a sweltering day at Broadway to try and finish off the re-stacking of the concrete cable troughs and lids. Here's a close up (including a bit of my finger!) of one of the troughs with a lid:


They are three feet long. By the end of the day there were a grand total of 38 pallets re-loaded with 25 troughs and lids on each - by my reckoning this will give us cable protection over a distance of 950 yards - more than enough for the initial phase southwards from the station.

John P taking a well earned rest surveying the results of the day's effort:


All these pallets are now ready for moving to their next storage position on platform 2 ready for use - so that the track bed at the north end of the site is now significantly cleared ready for ballasting.

And that is about all that S&T can do on the signalling front at Broadway for the time being.

A comment I must make is regarding the number of interested visitors that come up the drive on a Tuesday to see what is going on . I spoke to a couple from Crewe  who were staying at the caravan site opposite who were extremely complementary. I'm not sure if they had heard of our President Pete Waterman but I did a bit of name dropping!

Curly



Wednesday 10 August 2016

Bracket and Locking

Tuesday 9th Aug

The bracket signal which has been residing in Winchcombe yard has now had its baseplate welded on  
and coated with primer. Two more coats of paint and it will be ready to replace the shabby one at Cheltenham Race Ccourse - probably during the closed season.


Some adjustment was required to the lower locking tray at position two. The lower tappet blades were slightly out of alignment with the slots and were a bit tight. The only solution was to re-position the tray and drill some new mounting bolt holes. Here's Malcolm at it:


The lower tappet blades will be connected to the electric locks which will eventually be mounted on the steel beam underneath the trays. There will be 16 of these. We've marked the positions of these with the corresponding lever numbers - here's a sample shot:

 


In the meantime Peter B and Richard C carried on with the re-stacking of the concrete cable troughs on pallets up  the north end of the site. There's probably another day's work required to finish this and   then they will be moved off the track bed. 

Curly