Home Signal Finished

Tues 12th Feb

Except for the electrical wiring that is.

Six of us at Broadway today to finish the fitting out of the home signal.
The fitting of the down rod which connects to and operates the spectacle plate from the balance weight arm at the bottom occupied a significant part of our day. The top has this fitting to attach it to the spectacle plate.

And at the lower end this fitting screws on to the threaded  end of the rod and allows for some adjustment

The 19ft 6in long steel rod has  to be fed up through the scaffolding to Malcolm up top - John P trying to find the best gap - quite flexible!

Having got the rod secured at the top we found that there was insufficient thread engagement with the lower fitting attached to the balance weight arm  so the whole of the lower assembly had to be re-positioned 4"higher (all very time consuming).
There is a sequence to all this which means that the guides for the rod must be slid onto the rod before it is connected - four of these are shown here:

They clamp round the post. Two of them suit the smaller diameter of the upper half of the post and two the larger lower half. In fact in the end we decided that only three were necessary to support the rod from flexing. Here is a view of the lower one from above:

And a close up of a guide

And down at the bottom here is the balance weight arm with everything connected, including the wire down to the angle crank:

Some of the scaffolding poles get in the way a bit but you can just see the signal wire connected to the angle crank  going off to the left. This has been uncoiled down to Childswickham Bridge and is now waiting for us to put in the stakes and rollers to support it. All the cables have now been installed in the trenches and back-filled giving us access to do this.
The signal ladder has been fully fixed and a concrete block prepared with some shuttering to secure it at the bottom

All of this activity resulted in some scuffing of the paintwork, so the final job was some black and white brushwork to tidy things up. Just the electrical work to do here for the lamps and detector then it's complete. There will eventually be a telephone at this point - probably attached to the line-side cabinet.
Other work carried out today was back at Childswickham Bridge to adjust the position of the horizontal pulley  (on the two concrete blocks) directing the signal wire over the bridge towards the home signal and to fit a plastic tube under the track and across to this pulley to protect the wire. (one half of the tube is parked here for safekeeping until we bury it next time)

The troughing that we installed between the two bridges along the side of the caravan site have got completely filled with leaves from the adjacent trees - so these were cleared out ready for dropping the cables in.

Curly