Caley 828: More Steam....

Another satisfying week with CR 828 - we completed several small jobs and then on Thursday 1st September raised steam once more to do some test running. The purpose of the testing was to ensure that the lubrication to the cylinders and steam chest is functioning. It also let us check out the operation of the brake ejector and the steam brake at a higher pressure than the previous operational tests the week before. As expected we found a few minor issues, e.g. the small ejector valve appears to be stuck on its seat; the RH valve rod gland is blowing badly; the brakes are probably adjusted a bit too tightly but in general everything seems to be doing what it should..

Our main concern now is the delivery of the tender tyre forgings to Ian Riley - the most recent date he gave us is Monday 5th September - let's hope this happens and we get the wheels back as quickly as possible. The weather in October can still be quite pleasant for operating a pre-grouping tender loco...

Steam locomotives use a lot of securing devices to stop bits falling off. These come in a variety of types. The most common are split pins (taper and parallel) and split cotters. In this picture we're looking up at the small end of the left hand connecting rod. The tapered wedge that closes up the small end bearing is secured by two split cotters. The pin that locates the strap that encircles the small end is held tightly by the large nut which in turn is secured by another split cotter...

The four eccentric rods are bolted to the eccentric straps via the palm plate studs and nuts. The nuts are secured by split cotters. In this picture we can see that several of the cotters remain to be fitted..

Now in this picture we see that all the cotters have been fitted but those for the RH eccentric rods have not yet been opened out as we have still to complete the final valve setting checks on the RH valve (the picture is taken looking towards the rear of the loco)

This is the LH boiler feed injector. It transfers cold feed water from the tender tank to the boiler. It's a Gresham & Craven No.9 Injector. The Caley bought in a lot of proprietary parts from external suppliers and they normally bought their injectors from Gresham & Craven (still in business today). We needed to remove the two copper pipes at the bottom of the picture to repair some leaks and we also had a leak from the non-return valve that stops the boiler contents from leaking backwards through the injector..

Amy-Jane Budge inspecting the injector non-return valve seat after we removed the injector top fitting to get at the non-return valve.

The view into the top of the injector. Water being delivered into the boiler flows upwards through the non-return valve (not shown) and enters the boiler via an internal connection cast into the injector body. These injectors are known as "lifting" or "non-flooding" type as the injector body is set at a higher level than the maximum water level in the tender tank. They can be quite tricky in operation for firemen who are inexperienced with them...