Mid-Hants Railway Loco Shed

Jim Levin and Bob the Welder were drilling rivets from the Black Five's tender buffer-beam. The dragbox will need to have a few wasted panels replaced

   Restoration of #45379 from arrival to date

Neil Davis was taking Bittern's main driving axle axleboxes one at a time on the surface table, setting up centres and recording dimensions to prepare for fitting them in the frames

Frank and Steve were working on the lhs front valve crosshead slidebars (below), reaming the hole nearest the camera. Steve went off to make a fitted bolt, muttering that as originally assembled, the moving parts - 'would have been fighting each other'

  Restoration of Gresley A4 #60019 Bittern

Four photos (all 5th January 2005): Tony Wood

Ian Kirby was reaming holes in Bittern's valve-spindle crosshead slidebars for fitted bolts.
Steve was disparaging about the loco's original state -"They only used one size of shim in those" - he said, showing me the peel-off shim stock (couple of thou per peel) he's using. Frank was wielding a three-foot vernier caliper - something about aligning Bittern's axleboxes, I think

Tom Turner was outside making changes to the shute used at Ropley for filling coalbags for main line re-coaling*
(Rod Tye reckons this rig makes it now a one-man operation.)   Keith was giving Douglas a boiler washout

Photo (23rd December 2004): Tony Wood
*Coaling photo (21st December 2004): James Mayl

Inside the shed today    (16th December 2004): Tony Wood

Also:   Work on #71000: centre big-end

Peter Smith (Loco Shed volunteer) writes: Thursday 9th Dec. was a wonderful action-packed day at the MHR. Bittern's boiler arrived, S15's boiler lifted after a bit of trouble persuading it to part company with its frames. Duke of Gloucester arrived, plus support coach, midnight Wednesday in thick fog; the crew didn't know where they were until the fog lifted in the morning! After a lot of shunting we got the support coach into the yard. I then helped them to settle in, connect up the power supplies, show them the yard light switches, etc.. They would need to know the switch locations when they got back from supper at "The Pots". An action packed day.

Photo (9th December 2004): Ray Sully

Photo (8th December 2004): Ray Sully

Steam crane at work again today: changing a coach bogie

Photo (2nd December 2004): Ian Kennerley

Their school central heating had failed so Matt and Nick were sent home today. They turned up at Ropley to make a start on painting the spring rack constructed by Bob the Welder.

Photo (1st December 2004): Tony Wood