Hi,

A run through of my Secound day (or first full day) of Work experience:

Got on the 7:15 train again, then went to the depot and got my boiler suit on. Waited around in the mess room for couple of minutes before going off with my apprentice to work on the south driving car of a Class 168/1, No. 168109, We were working downstairs (downstairs being the Underframe and upstairs being the Interior).

We started off by testing the TPWS (Train Protection and Warning System) overspeed sensors using a mobile tester. We then went on to test the AWS (Automatic Warning System), this involved me sitting in the drivers seat while my apprentice went and waved a magnet under the AWS magnet, giving me 3 clear aspects, a caution aspect for me to cancel and another caution aspect to check that the automatic brake was working.

Once this was all done, we went to the engine to change a centrifuge oil filter, this works by spinning the filter and the inpurities being pushed out towards to filter paper. It was this filter paper we had to change, this was a very oily proceedure to say the least! Having changed the filter, we reinstalled the it and ran the engine up to see if it would run. This made it very noisy, as a 165 was running it's engine most of the day after having it changed and a 168/2 running constantly, with the odd rev up!

The next job was to taken some oil samples from the final drive, yet another messy job! Myself, my apprentice and another apprentice went off for a quick tour around the Depot, we went to see the Wrexham 67 (sorry, can't remember the number!) that was idling in the yard, then to see Lesley the shunter shunting the Wrexham & Shropshire coaches into the wheel lathe.

After a bit of lunch, we had to test the braking and trip cock system, yet again this involved me sitting in the drivers seat while my apprentice tripped and reset the tripcock, with me calling out whether the train fault light came on or not. Then We had to test the Passenger Comms system. The Passenger Comms system works by the passenger calling the cab, this sounds a loud alarm, the driver has to reset this by kicking a yellow button by his feet. If he doesn't do this, the train will come to a stop, the driver then has to answer the phone, we checked all the Passenger comms points on the unit.

The final job was to fill the batteries on our car

P.S. Sorry about the lack of pictures, I'll try to take some tomorrow!

Simon