Ropley is...... D I S C O!    Back to Articles

Arrived a few minutes earlier than usual this morning; Oh how I wish kids were always on Summer Holiday (from the point of view of no school runs clogging the morning traffic, anyway!) Best bit about being early is getting somewhere sensible to park; worst bit, first one in makes the Tea...
 
The usual Wednesday suspects welcomed another new man, Keith, today. He said he's going to come on a few different days of the week to see how he fitted in; we tried to warn him about the Thursday gang, but I guess he'll have to find out for himself...
(It's all just banter, folks, honest!)
 
Anyway, to work. Lots going on today on various locos including Lord Nelson, the U-Boat and the Standard 4. And Duncan was painting the Black 5 so the wheeldrop was festooned with notices warning us to enter at our peril. Duncan is a perfectionist so would notice any speck of dust stuck to his new paint if one was so foolish as to wander into the newly designated paint shop.
 
Have you ever wondered where our locos get their purified water from? I knew it wasn't just mains water we fed them and long realised that purified water means less scale in the boilers meaning fewer boiler wash-outs. But never quite knew the process at Ropley. Morley, our electrical whizz, was working in the plant room adding some exterior alarms to it in case of failure. Apparently, recently, the plant had failed and no-one realised until a fireman taking water into loco tender found there wasn't any!
 
The plant is in the yard, between the main workshop and the David Snow building. It purifies the water then pumps it to a large holding tank called a Braithwaite tank above the Ropley picnic site. From there gravity does the rest to fill waiting tenders at the platform.
Morley has added a sensor inside said tank to activate an alarm at the plant should the water level drop; as he said, it's a good job there was a couple of spare wires in the loom already in place between them! While he was about it, he duplicated the original plant status indicators inside the room to large and obvious coloured lamps outside; they have already been christened Morley's disco lights... (nice touch! Ed)
 
Back in the workshop, Les talked himself to helping Matt make up some copper feed pipes for lubricating the U-Boat motion. The lubricator is on the left running plate and the left motion has all been plumbed. As you can imagine, there are quite a few bends in the length of pipe between left and right, passing as it does under the boiler and through running plate to reach it's destination.. Not sure how many of at least three I noted he'd finished by the time he packed it in at end of afternoon!
 
Lord Nelson has had her back driving-wheel set removed a few weeks ago now. A couple of us set about removing the bearings from their housings ready to be re-metalled. Suitably labelled we left them for cleverer folk than us to attend to.
 
The Standard 4 was still defying attempts to remove anything without a fight. Her valves and pistons are seized solidly in their respective bores and had defied all sorts of attempts at removal.  Last resort was to cut theem apart from inside their bores with an arc welder with a special rod that does the same as my favourite tool, the Gas-axe. Mark was working on this most of the day with the arc weder illuminating that corner of the workshop in spectacular fashion.
 
And the rest of us were dismantling, cleaning and re-fitting the bearings supporting the standard 4 reversing-gear; even that wasn't straight forward although it did all come to bits easily enough; all part of the fun at an average Wednesday at Ropley.
 
Until next week; from your Ropley Scribe.
 
Dave.