Almost Ready For The First ‘String’ Course

Hello blog fans! I hope that you're all well and managing to avoid this miserable weather.

The signal box building team have been pulling out all the stops (and some hair!) since our last post and has at last succeeded in raising the stonework around the locking room door to the correct height to receive the lintels. This is really something of a milestone and has taken us a fair amount of time, but only because we have beavering away at the other three walls at the same time in order to bring all the courses of stone up relatively evenly.

Once the mortar has set hard, we will mount the lintels and, for the first time in over 60 years, the ‘box will have an inside and an outside. We now have only a finishing course of stone to ‘top off’ the front wall to enable us to mount the first of the two ‘string’ courses which mark the clear division between the locking room and the operating room floor.

Further progress is expected soon, and you'll be the first to know when it does.

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 stra...
Read more