Boiler work

The running season at the Gloucester Warwickshire Steam Railway has now started with service trains at weekends until April, then the mid-week service trains begin. Last week the railway ran special service trains, mid-week, for the Cheltenham Gold Cup which proved very popular with race goers and had two eight coach trains, all sold out.

When I arrived on Saturday I was asked if I would like to do some boiler work on 3850's boiler. The boiler is currently being repaired and the outer wrapper needs the bottom third replacing. To try and keep the costs down to a minimum some of the preparation work is to be done at the railway before the boiler is sent away to a boiler-smiths so new platework can be welded in and the new stays inserted.

Before the old section of the plate work can be cut out the stays needed to be removed which is a slow process. The first thing needed to be done is to remove all the nuts from the stays on the inside of the firebox. The method chosen to do this was to grind a slit through the centre of the nut and stay, being careful not to score the copper firebox, and then chisel the nut off. Here is a picture of the nuts being slotted.

  

In the picture above you can see on the right the stays with the nuts removed already and ones to be completed on the left. By the end of the day we had removed 108 stay nuts with 104 left to do. 

During a short break from grinding I managed to get a short video of Dinmore Manor, the locomotive in service that day, return from Cheltenham on the second train of the day.