Trog

You should have seen the sort of things the PW got up to. Myself and a gang once carried rails out over a long timber bridge with no decking fitted. We walked out on the long timbers carrying the rails between our legs/feet using rail dogs, clipped the rails up and started running trains. Quite what they would make these days of a section of track where with no warning or lighting you could walk off the end of a bridge abutment and find that the 4' and cesses are a 12' drop into a canal I do wonder.

One of my ex-colleagues was involved with tests involving lowering a 25Kv conductor wire until it set an arc to a steam engine funnel. So they could determine what clearances were needed. He also discovered that it was 'safe' or at least he did not end up a little bit dead, to stand with one foot on the footplate and one on the platform they were doing the testing in, while there was an arc in progress from the contact wire to the loco funnel.

If you reduce the voltage to a quarter of the normal, to get the same amount of power I would assume that the current would have to increase by four fold. Higher currents tend to require larger cross sectional areas in the conductors. If running on 6.25Kv would the loco raise the second pantograph to reduce the electrical load at the point of contact between contact wire and pantograph carbons? Thus once the clearance tolerances were reduced and the sections of 6.25Kv were no longer required, would the second pantographs now also no longer be required, and follow the 6.25Kv sections into oblivion.

Did the prototype Mr Fusion powered car not display strange behaviour at 88MPH?

I believe that I have been told that it may have been originally intended for the south end of the WCML from just north of UB41 on the south side of the 11MP to be 6.25Kv, certainly there is a disturbance in the layout of the OHL masts there to this day with several extras that don't appear to have ever done anything useful. Perhaps they were intended for a voltage dropping 'neutral' section, that never came to pass.

I always thought that Bletchley high street looked not so much run down as run over. It was perhaps telling that the smartest and most prosperous looking shop fronts were the Bookie's and the one with the large sign seemingly designed to attract passing trade marked Criminal Defence Lawyers.

Trains roll very well a driver I knew had his loco fail as he passed the neutral section at Bourne End south of Berkhamsted, and coasted all the way to a signal at danger half way down Camden Bank. Where he used the SPT to report that his loco had failed at Bourne End. It was then agreed that the signalman would set him up with the straightest available run into a suitable platform. The driver then released the brake and coasted the last half mile into Euston. I have also seen a picture taken from the window of Watford PSB showing four or five members of BR staff pushing a gapped 501 unit back onto the con rail. Would love to see a safe method of working written up for doing that with a loaded passenger train these days. I have also done a considerable amount of hand, JCB and excavator shunting over the years, a JCB can easily shift a dozen loaded wagons with its rear arm. The secret is to pull on the load not the end of the wagon, so the pull on the wagon is distributed, and you don't end up trying to explain how the end of the wagon came to just fall off in your hands.

Happens all the time I can remember a couple of instances, a PTO who's handwriting was so dodgy that the stores ordering lady read his request for 200Y (yards) of welded fencing netting as 200x (and therefore presumably rolls) of netting. This only came to light when a convoy of lorries turned up one afternoon. Also a timekeeper who ordered 100 of the blue rolls used for hand cleaning and ended up with 100 bales of 48 rolls. He was desperately trying to give them away to everybody as his storage was rammed with them.

I can remember the Watford PW maintenance gangs using hand spanners stamped as belonging to the LMS and LNWR in the 1980's.

An old boy I worked with on the railway in the early 1980's said that when he had asked an older colleague years before what he had thought about the grouping. The (ex LNWR) colleague started swearing about the bl00dy Midland Railway, which rather took him aback as the colleague did not usually swear much.

Did not work, it took us minutes to discover that the spent ballast bridged the slots nicely. If the branch was open I would often try to make it so loaded spoil trains ran direct to the tip, as that gave the machine drivers at the tip something to do Monday morning, saved tripping the wagons down there during the week and stopped the C&W from carding them at an intermediate stabling siding. The C&W also tended to go round the empty spoil trains on Saturday and card wagons due for maintenance, which gave you a train with wagons that you theoretically could not load scattered through it. Which would potentially have been a big problem on site as you would then need to move the spoil train about on site to dig all the short lengths of old ballast that had been next to the carded wagons, which would waste hours of the possession.

So are you saying that the moulds are Dunn for?

Ahhh tipping Mermaids by hand we used to have such fun on those long ago Sundays.

That usually did not damage the track as the now empty wagon was more or less floating on the pile of ballast under it. If that happened you just swore a bit shovelled some of the ballast clear. Then put a Duff jack under each axlebox and lifted the wagon. You then got some blokes to push the wagon off the jacks in the direction of the rails, and repeated until it landed back on the rails. Quite often happened when the driver stopped or slowed the train unexpectedly during unloading as with Dogfish and Catfish wagons once the doors were open there was no way of shutting them until the wagon was empty.

I suggest that you do not let your SO know that you keep your nylons hidden under the drive. As they might think that really takes the biscuit.

Another recycling method that was used occasionally was when track with new ballast had to be reballasted. A typical reason for this was when the operating department derailed one of their wagons, as any P-Way person can tell you these persons of parental marital status -ve always do this just before a length of newly relaid track. Not stopping until they reach older track with smaller ballast that is easier on their feet as they investigate where their pet vacuum has escaped to. In this situation you might lift the damaged track panels/sleepers and then load the top ballast and first couple of inches of the bed ballast into empty ballast hoppers. The remaining bottom ballast would then be scarified to break up the compacted stone under where the sleepers had been. Levelled with a laser equipped dozer, and new track laid. While this was going on the 'spoil' hoppers would be worked to a cross over and shunted to the line being worked on. They would then be run back to site and the ballast dropped back to more or less where it came from. Budget saved for more important things like the excessive overtime being done on all those ballast cleaning jobs mentioned above.

I suppose that ballast cleaners are a form of ballast recycling, where a machine trundles along the track with what looks like a chainsaw blade made out of 12" cast iron links with 1" diameter steel bar tines sticking forward by 6" or so whizzing round fast than the eye can see, and if you end up cutting through an old concrete signal foundation or some such louder than the ear wants to hear. The chain links are paddle shaped and drag the removed material to the top of the machine where it drops into what looks like a 6 yard builders skip with mesh floors mounted on vibrating rams. Anything too big to drop through the top screen is probably rubbish and skates off to the spoil conveyor for disposal. What drops through the top screen but not the lower screen is probably decent stone and drops off the return conveyors just behind the cutter bar. The return was usually set to come off the return conveyor and hit the rail, as this tended to spread it out a bit, giving better support to the track the back end of the machine was about to run on. Also no point shovelling stuff to spread it if you don't have to. The dirt and smalls dropped through both of the screens before joining the over large rejects on the spoil conveyor. If working a ballast cleaner you watched the return stone, if it was bouncing off the rails all was well, if there was enough dirt in it still to make it clump. You asked the operator to partially open a slide that allowed some of the cut material to bypass the screens and go direct to the spoil conveyor. Then with less volume of material crossing the screens, they would do a better job of cleaning the stone that reached them. If doing this did not improve things enough you asked the operator to totally excavate, and everything the machine cut bypassed the screens and went straight up the spoil conveyor and into the spoil train or down the bank. In I think the late 1980's the clever chaps at Derby Research came up with the idea of fitting a third screen so the machines could screen more ballast with more somewhat smaller stone being cleaned and allowed into the return. This was probably a good idea if you were ballast cleaning track with stone that had only gone so far, but BR was so far behind that the machines were being used on track where the ballast was well past its best. The extra amount of screen in the hopper just made it more likely to clog, thus the return was not properly cleaned, the return then failed the rail bounce test, and the excavate slide would be pulled to reduce what reached the screen, which rather defeated the whole idea. The first machine to be converted which I think was the Nottingham machine came out of Derby Research and somewhat to the displeasure of the boffins who wanted to watch it in action was allocated to the Watford Area for its first shift. This should not have been a huge surprise as the Watford Area did so much reballasting that we usually had one or two of the other LM areas ballast cleaning machines working each week-end as well as our own two 76310 and 76216. (I think our record was working six ballast cleaning machines on one weekend with spoil wagons being tripped down to us from as far away as Scotland.) The boffins were even less impressed when after having driven down to somewhere on the Northampton Loop I took one look at the state of the return and had the operator to totally excavate all night.

He has a good reputation, is supposed to be the only one working there with honest intentions.

I just wish that I had got to see the S&Ts faces as they tried to figure out what the @@@@ was going on. As electrically conductive rubber is not going to be high on any ones list of possibilities.

Some years ago there was an attempt to come up with a stiffer more wear resistant version of the rubber rail pads we were then using. Some genius at the manufacturers worked out that adding carbon black to the rubber/cork mixture then used would achieve this aim.

GWR steel sleepers.

Will a GWR electric train be powered by copper topped Duracell batteries?

That is perhaps a shame as it must have been one of the longer runs of continuous stations with the Railway Station, Fire Station, BT Poilice Station and TV? Police Stations all lined up in a row.

I thought that a lot of the drag-line cranes used years ago for ironstone open cast mining used to be electrically powered? Is this just Network rail reinventing the caterpillar track?

Lowering track is rarely a good idea as drainage of the resulting dip can be a problem. As for why put the hump in EWR perhaps as it will be a slower line they can change the gradients faster so making the hump shorter and cheaper.