The Locking Room Floor & Lead-Out Bench – Part 1

To provide suitable support for the locking room floor and lead-out bench, our signalling engineers required three pairs of rails, suitably spaced across the width of the ‘box, to be cemented into sockets cut into the rear wall and to project forward across the locking room floor, through a prepared aperture in the front wall, to the trackside. These rails will provide a rigid base for the heavy floor timbers required to take the weight of the various rods, cranks etc.. emanating from the lever frame on the floor above.


As the internal walls will be plastered, we have chosen to build the locking room using concrete blocks which will not be visible in the finished ‘box. These will be faced with stone externally using material which has been sourced locally and carefully matched to the original building. Additional solid block pillars either side will carry the steel beams that will, in turn, support the lever frame. With the floor supports described above in place, construction of the walls and pillars has just commenced. In addition, rails to act as lintels have been fitted in the front wall to form the access slot for the lead-out bench.


Finally, as an aside, whilst studying the signal box site, two of the team members, Tim & Matt, noticed that the ground in front of the ‘box sounded slightly ‘hollow’ underfoot. A test dig revealed wood a couple of inches below the surface. This would seem to be the original lead-out bench, or at least a wooden bench in the position of the lead-out bench!


The level of this is significantly lower than the track, but the more recent concrete benches still in situ that the team keep coming across suggest that the track was at a similar level to the present. It must also be remembered, of course, that when the site was acquired for preservation in 1997, the area concerned was covered with some approx. 7,500 tons of contaminated waste, so we cannot be absolutely sure that we are back at the previous track level.


It will be very interesting to see what other clues are uncovered as work progresses.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fitting The NER Lever Frame

Image
Hello all! Today we're going to show how the unique North Eastern Railway Central Division level frame recovered from Pesspool Junction will be fitted into the S&DR signal box.  The 1861 box at the end of it's life. Note the additional window to the locking room, seen on the left hand wall in this picture. This is the operating floor plan showing aperture for frame and *indicative* joist locations to accommodate this. Dimensions: Apologies: all dimensions used here are imperial as the equipment and building itself looks to have been designed and built using these. They also work out very nicely! Front to back, the surviving box structure measures 10’ inside the walls. This has been used in this plan, and is assumed to be correct. The aperture for the frame to sit is drawn here as being 6” from the front wall. This is our datum, from which the other measurements are derived. This can be adjusted plus or minus 2”, but will then shuffle the rest of the aperture across. If it
Read more

NER Northern Division Lattice Signals

Image
This is a very challenging blog post to actually write, as there has been a lot of research and work that has turned up new aspects to the story. I shall try to put this together in the order in which we’ve discovered the details! When planning out the scheme, we weren’t sure if the gantry would be able to feature in Phase 1; and upon learning it wouldn’t, we needed a signal to route trains into either the Tebay platform or the Bay platform. In amongst the equipment on site when we got involved was a selection of steel lattice posts (as an aside, there *were* wooden lattice posts trialled by the Midland Railway…). These were all North Eastern Railway, Northern Division signals, that had originally been on the Newcastle to Carlisle line. Brampton had been mentioned as their original location, but that was not important at this time. Besides the three straight posts was a bracket signal, sat on top of the concrete sleeper pile, which looked to be a good bet; albeit requiring some consi
Read more

The Rafters – Part 1

Image
A couple of nice days over the weekend saw the signalbox acquire a somewhat skeletal appearance as we added the rafters to the previously erected ridge beam – a string line top and bottom ensured that everything was nicely lined up end to end so that the tongue and groove close boarding that will sit on top will be nice and flat and provide a splendid base for the slates.  On completion of this task, someone suggested taking down the string lines until some ‘wag’ suggested that the rafters might follow! So we left them in place! It may look like an unorthodox build process seeing as we have not yet completed the gables, but the slope of the rafters is required for me to accurately build the gables to profile and also to position the very large wooden purlins that will bear a large part of the weight of the roof.  The rafters on the backside will require a little more tailoring, I think, as the original rear wall on which they will sit varies in thickness, is not perfectly straight and
Read more