SVR S&T Dept.
SIGNALLING NOTES - Chris. Hall
Hopefully I shall now keep up to date with these articles. This Winter is the first one for a few years where the Signal Engineering Department has not been burdened with major infrastructure renewal (unless our signalling cable gets damaged in the track relaying near Eardington). Since the last article, we visited Highley on two further occasions, with different personnel, measuring the north end FPL bar so that I ended up with three grubby scraps of paper with different sets of measurements. On the final set of measurements any dimension that did not agree with previous values was remeasured yet again.
Armed with the definitive set of measurements we drilled and formed the three new pieces of 'T-section' bar, attempting, this time, an accuracy of ±1/32″ for the hole spacing. By the end of the day we had almost finished the drilling - on checking the centre section, there seemed to be something wrong. Grubby though they were, all three drawings showed four holes whereas there were only three. And it was shorter than it should be by about three feet.
By the following weekend, I had produced a legible, printed drawing so that it could be independently checked against the manuscript notes. The centre section was scrapped and we started again on this piece. In between other jobs, we were clearing out our 'back room' (the room behind the original ladies toilets, latterly the telephone exchange, which is accessed from the Booking Hall) The back room had started to show signs of distress, cracking, rain water leaks and subsidence and was to be demolished and rebuilt as a shared mess room.
Confident now that the new FPL bar was exactly per drawing, all we had to do was to transport it to Highley. We had a master plan: set C has a disabled brake coach where a seventeen foot long length of steelwork can (just) be accommodated via the Down side Guard's door (we had used this set to transport the bar for Arley). I noted that set C was rostered as the Bridgnorth set on Sunday 22nd November and was told to get the bar to Highley. It would mean unloading it track-side at Highley, which would require the Guard's permission.
Unfortunately when the set passed through in the Up direction at lunchtime, I noted that this coach had been shunted out either for maintenance or in anticipation of the Santa service requirement. However there was class 20, some wagons and a brake van unloading wood in the Back Road for the lighting-up pile. I asked the Driver and Guard if they could fit in a trip to Highley - they were willing - and with the Duty Officer's permission the open wagons were shunted to the Down Yard for unloading and the brake van run round. We loaded the three seventeen-foot long bars into the brake and set off for Highley.
On arrival we were treated to a shunting demonstration in the Yard while we unloaded our equipment and hid it in the long grass. Refreshments (bacon butties and tea) were available from the station shop and we returned engine and van to Bewdley, the class 20 continuing light engine to Kidderminster. We don't often have a special train expressly for the Signal Engineering Department but it does happen occasionally. Our thanks to Driver Stan Matthews, Guard Iain Hollis and Duty Officer Dave Bratton for making this possible.
On Saturday 5th December we had our Departmental Christmas meal in the Swan at Chorley (near Highley) - for some reason I was presented with a Swiss-chocolate replica of a HSS twist drill, carefully broken in half. I felt there were other claimants for this trophy, including the one person who had been able to walk to the pub, but was assured that I was the more deserving. We had three Sundays left when we knew there would be no trains north of Arley for most of the day and we decided upon 13th December for the work.
We had already taken the heavy equipment to Highley the previous weekend (29th November) and made arrangements to ensure that the station's diesel generator would be available to us. The bolts holding the FPL bar to the rail had been there for some time and most would need to cut free. We had already cut the bolts ends flush to speed up this work and to test that the generator could power our large grinder.
Removing the bolts was more troublesome than expected: slicing through the nut and chiselling off the two halves of the nut was fairly straightforward but the bolts needed hitting so hard to force them through the rail that some of them just rivetted over and had to be ground off. Three hours into the job we had the old FPL bar lying in the four foot and the new hangers fitted, so we stopped for lunch (we had brought our own). The rest of the job was a bit of an anti-climax: the new FPL bar fitted perfectly (except on one hanger that, itself, was twisted which we removed as redundant) and we marked up the drive plate each end, drilled the bolt holes, reconnected the drives, adjusted the drive from the box so that the FPL made up nicely and booked it all back on. All complete with an hour of daylight left so that we could collect the tools and drive back.
Another job best done when there were no crowds of passengers around was to renew the timbers on the Down Starting signal bracket at Hampton Loade. One board had become rather rotten and was starting to grow vegetation. We had ordered the timber and the C&W had been helpful in cutting the boards to length. The handrail supports (¾″ threaded bar) would have to be renewed and these had already been prepared and painted with the help of the routine maintenance gang.
In January we therefore replaced the decking, one piece at a time - these are held down by countersunk ½″ bolts and by the handrail supports. The original Great Western design had been short planks running from front to back, supported on the two pieces of angle iron which formed the bracket structure. The walkway was therefore a cantilever with nothing under the portion that formed the walkway. These could be interesting to negotiate as they reached the end of their life but we replaced the last of these in 1994 (Bewdley South Inner Homes bracket) with the newer design of transverse planks supported on four front to back lengths of angle iron rivetted to angle iron bolted to the bracket angle iron. One of these supports was rather corroded and we replaced it as well.
The back room at Bewdley has now been demolished and we have been rewiring the front half of our previous accommodation in preparation for the new doorway opening (closed off some time ago) to be made once the demolished portion has been rebuilt. A few cables need to be diverted at Bridgnorth near the Platform 1 water column and this job will proceed once the various ductwork has been installed. A final reminder that this article and the photographs associated with it, as well as other information on Signal Engineering, can also be viewed on the unofficial S&T (signals) web site at http://www.svrsig.org/ (or look for 'svrsig' on google).