Connecting Up

Tuesday 16th April

Another good turnout today with eight of us at Toddington to continue with the installation of the ground signals at Toddington South.
The signal we installed last week has now had all its wire connections made.

The shuttering round the concrete blocks has been removed and the ballast tidied up. One of the time consuming tasks is the fixing of the signal wires round the thimbles which attach to the shackles linking everything together. This is Malcolm W's task and I am sure he has sore fingers at the end of the day - I counted at least 10 of these joints were made today.
The objective is to ensure that these joints cannot work loose with the significant tension applied when a lever is pulled . The procedure is as follows:
1.Bend wire round thimble with the aid of pliers
2. Cut wire to length leaving approx 8" from thimble.
3. Unwind the seven strands of this excess length.
4. Wrap the first strand tightly round the main wire until it is all used up
5. Repeat successively for all the remaining strands blending all the sharp wire ends with pliers
It should look like this:

Now a few paces North to give our attention to the second ground Signal. 

It has been decided to install a trackside phone at this point so another concrete block has been sited -  we have utilised the 90 degree pipe bend to feed its cable in from underground (you may remember this from a previous blog about the line-side cabinets) 

Then the signal, and angle crank are bolted down - the phone assembly has been positioned on top of the wooden template for its photo shoot with Dinmore approaching from the signal box

The signal wire from here must also pass under the track so we are fixing a pulley to the sleeper ends to connect with the wire coming from the signal box on the Cotswold side. George B and Carl C wrestle with the through-bolting (spanner underneath job with knuckles in the ballast!) 

And here we with the wire sling in place:

With all the connections now in place it remains to check that both signals operate properly.
This will be left to Malcolm and George on Thursday.
I don't think you'll get a dialling tone yet Peter!

Final act of the day was to collect and tidy away the discarded sleepers that P Way are replacing

Curly