Winter work at the GWSR - Valve removal

The winter maintenance is well under way on all the locomotives at the the Gloucester Warwickshire Steam Railway. All the locomotives are drained of water and bunkers/tenders emptied of coal.

One of the jobs I helped with was the valve removal from GWR 42xx tank engine "4270", highlighted in yellow in the drawing below. This involves taking off a piece of the running plate in between the buffer beam and the cylinder block, removing the valve chest cover (highlighted in pink), disconnecting the motion and pulling it out of the front of the cavity.

 

You can see the running boards has been romoved in the picture below.  



The steam chest cover removed and given a clean up with a rag and some deisel and parrafin.

Finally  this is a picture of the valves once they had been completely removed from the stem chest. Unfortunatly there were no spare hands to take a picture of the valve being removed. The steam chests were inspected and other than there being a small amount of soot in the cavity they looked pretty good.

The remainder of the day was spent taking of a rather awkward overflow pipe from the fireman's side injector. This is so it can be re-bent and redirect the steam backwards rather than directly sideways.