Tidying Up

 Tuesday 24th March

Having successfully  completed the replacement of new cabling between CRC and Bishops Cleeve Station Road bridge - we have decided today to tidy up trackside by removing the now redundant "coffin" joint enclosures . These are fairly substantial brick built structures which required a good bashing with a sledgehammer to break up

They have a tinplate metal cover held on with 4 stud bolts. Here's the before during and after:

All remaining visible cabling has been cut off and removed. We ended up with probably 1.5 tons of bricks and concrete to take back to Winchcombe for disposal. 

John P and myself did this while the rest of the team went back to Gotherington to complete the replacement and commissioning of the point motor

Curly

A Bit of Training

 Tuesday 10th March

A great turn out today with 10 of us attending at the S & T workshop at Winchcombe for what was to be a day of demonstration,  fault finding procedures  and education.

Initially Peter W presented a slide show to explain how the electrical circuitry of  token machines worked:

And then a practical demo of the machines in action. To do this a pair of the token machines have been wired up to operate on the bench and Peter W and Andy D volunteering to be the signalman  at Winchcombe and Cheltenham to show how the tokens worked in practice.

With a very interested audience!

And as if that wasn't enough excitement , there followed an equally interesting presentation on telephone technology given by Mike S on the BT 700 handsets used on the railway and how to maintain them.

Then off to Winchcombe signal box locking room where a Strowger " telephone  exchange" is installed for a working demo

 We now have a lot of electrical knowledge between us, boosted by our new recruits Martin H and Mike C - this bodes well for fault finding in the many and varied systems on the railway. Kevern O continues with the setting up of the acceptance lever system between Toddington and Broadway and a SPAD warning system. More on this in the future when I understand a bit more about it!

I have been a bit tardy in publishing the previous weeks work so here is a brief summary of March 3rd.

A bit of Finishing Off at Cheltenham with a good turn out with 8 of us. Some work still to do at the new pointwork to set up the detector linkages to the point motor

Peter W checking that we have power to the unit

And two more bits of track bonding to finish off - Martin on the drill unit

The electrical work has now been completed  and all the stage one cabling replacement  project is complete. Testing has been carried out and,  except for a few small problems which have been ironed out, all is working well. 

Congratulations to all involved for carrying out a complicated project which was completed on time for the new running season.

Curly

PS

While we were in the Winchcombe locking room being Stoweraged  I took a photo of the locking trays which I think you will find interesting - here is a fine example of the mechanical lever locking that keeps the signalling safe. Worthy of a bit more training for us here to understand all the interlocking sequences  - one for the future!

Note the electrical locks connected below.