Bank Holiday weekend meant three days working at the railway, which is why I’m a day later than usual with my write-up this week. Saturday and Sunday were running days and I was rostered as guard and driver. Our loco for both days was Hunslet 4wDH “Champion”: because she’d been out undergoing an overhaul until recently we’re using her more often now to even up the mileages across the fleet.

With no events on at the museum and a chance of rain showers we weren’t expecting a large footfall so ran a short train with just the two 1928 Baguley “toast rack” carriages and our guard’s van. One advantage of the lighter rolling stock on our narrow gauge railway is that we can hand shunt with just a couple of us. Myself and a colleague assembled the train in the yard, cleaned and swept the carriages, and I (as guard) made a final check of the couplings and brakes before shunting out onto the main line and giving the green flag to proceed up to the top station.

We broke for lunch around 12:30, and I handed over to my relief as guard, taking up the driving duty for the rest of the day. The controls of the Hunslets are very straightforward and after a good amount of shunting practice around the yard I’ve become quite familiar with driving these locos. The focus of my training on the passenger services is to drive smoothly and consistently, learning the track and how to judge and control my speed appropriately. With a light train on dry rails this is reasonably easy; as I go on I’ll be hauling longer, heavier trains and experiencing different conditions.

Sunday was similar, but Monday saw me back on steam department duty. We needed to position O&K 9998 “Elouise” over the inspection pit, but to do that we first had to rearrange almost everything in the loco shed! Since I’m a trainee I got driving duties while my colleagues handled the shunting hand signals, coupling and uncoupling, and setting the points. I prepped and started “Champion”, and hauled three Simplexes and a Ruston out of number 5 road before propelling them back onto the main line where they’d be out of the way.

Next it was back into the shed to be coupled up to “Emmet” so I could move her onto number 1 road in front of the carriage shed. I parked “Champion” there and switched over to Hunslet 38 “Weyfarer” which was already coupled behind “Elouise” in the shed on number 4 road. I propelled out, and then back onto number 5 road and positioned “Elouise” over the pit before being uncoupled and moving back a little to make space to walk between the locos.

With the stock movements completed we could start working on Elouise, making her ready for her upcoming annual boiler exam. First job was to pour descaling solution into the bottom of the boiler to help dissolve scale and sludge that we weren’t able to wash out above the foundation ring. We left that working its chemical magic and climbed down into the pit to remove the ashpan. This comprises a number of sections—front, back and side plates—that are bolted together, and need to be removed so that we can access the firebox by climbing up between the frames from underneath.

I tried climbing up but it was rather a tight fit between the frames with the rods for the brake gear in the way too, and I felt like I was becoming wedged so I reversed course and came back down the steps. Our head of steam is a good bit slimmer than me so he stepped up (literally) and I went up on the footplate to hold the work lamp through the firehole and observe what he was doing. He worked his way around the whole inside of the firebox, brushing off the soot and then scraping scale from the steel surface.

With the tubeplate, back, sides and crown cleaned he used a hammer to test each of the stays. I was surprised by how quickly he worked: he must have done each of the six rows of ten stays along each side in around five seconds with the same bright sound coming from each one as the hammer head bounced off. For some reason I’d imagined the testing of stays to be a slow, deliberate process, but with hindsight it’s obvious how the fast rhythm serves to both get through the multitude of stays quickly and let you more easily spot when one sounds different, indicating a cracked stay.

I was keen to have another attempt at climbing up into the firebox, so I removed the fleece I was wearing under my overalls, trying to reduce my cross-section slightly, and had another go at climbing up. I think it helped that this time we’d removed all the ashpan components, and I got my chest past the point where I feared becoming stuck on my first attempt. I figured that I’d be able to make it from there so continued up until I was sitting on top of the stringers each side of the rear axle. Success! And this also means that I’ve got no excuse for dodging the hard work when it comes to reinstalling the ash pan after the cold boiler inspection.

All that remained was to shunt Elouise out of the shed and wash out the descaler before putting everything back in the shed and heading home. There are still a couple of maintenance jobs to be done involving the steam manifold, injector and whistle valves, plus a couple of other tasks, and then we’ll be booking a visit by the boiler inspector in due course. I’ll not be at the railway next weekend so there’ll be no narrow gauge update from me for a couple of weeks.

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