Crank Setting

Tuesday 8th Nov

Five of us at Broadway today to do some preliminary layout of the cranks on the steel plates at the exit of the signal box tunnel under platform 2. and to continue with work on the locking frame.

A bit of freshly laid ballast to be scraped away and a couple of holes prepared for the two rodding stools which we are temporarily inserting to line things up. Keith L just loves shovelling ballast. A few of the fittings are lined up on the platform:

The cranks are of two different heights to prevent fouling. The four cranks we are fitting first will take the rodding from the tunnel through a right angle to direct it northwards up the side of platform 2. First step to set the stools in position so that we are approx equidistant between the sleeper ends and the platform wall. This allows a sufficient gap for a cable to be laid up against  the wall. So it looks as though our positioning of the steel plates was spot on.

  

All heights are now fixed by the steel plates.  We now slide in the 18ft lengths of rodding to align the crank positions. The holes in the ends of each crank have to be aligned at 45 degrees .

Unfortunately we only brought three lengths of point rodding from Winchcombe on a previous visit so we had to do a bit of swopping to set all four cranks.
We have now marked and pilot drilled the four holes for each crank base . When we have set a further    three cranks for the southbound rodding and the pulley wheels , we will remove the plates and use the magnetic base drill to open out all the holes for bolting. (not enough headroom to get at these holes with it).
These four northbound rods will operate the two points and two facing point locks. Levers 12,13 and 15,16.

Unfortunately rain ended up stopping play by mid afternoon so we repaired to the locking room to admire the efforts of Malcolm and George bringing the locking frame jigsaw to a conclusion. All locks and locking bars have now been fitted and subject to a bit of easement here and there it is now complete. Only remains to do the testing to make sure that all the locking combinations work.

 All 60 of the support brackets for the attaching the signal wire rollers to the platform walls have now been drilled and are ready for action.

Curly