KSE Signalling Project

Further progress has been made with most of the rafters now settled in place with just a little ‘truing up’ required here and there due to the fact that the majority were either twisted of bent. The sun shone a little brightly today (never happy are we!) and, by 2pm, a temperature of 24°C was crisping our skin as we fitted our last rafter of the day and called time. With the big, heavy purlins now firmly secured in position, we will proceed to construct the gables to their full height thus completing another important phase of the building – hopefully later this week. Keep watching!

Construction has begun once again on the signal box as the hand-carved decoration on the ends of the purlins has been completed allowing us to set them in position on the gable ends and begin cutting and fitting the rafters to the rear section of the roof. I think I mentioned previously that these rafters would require more than a little ‘fiddling’ to get a good fit and so it has proved. This has been compounded by the fact that the ridge timber, after a few weeks exposure to the Cumbrian sun and rain, has developed a marked twist at one end (please see the photo) which we will also now have to accommodate. Despite these irritations, we have now managed a satisfactory fit of a rafter at each end of the ridge leaving another nine required to fill the gap. I will keep you posted.

This blog post deals with something of an unsavoury nature: signals for our project that don't have any NER pedigree! An LMS-designed single dolly at Kirkby Stephen West, on the Settle-Carlisle But don't be too concerned: the LMS-designed dollies are very appropriate for KSE, as there is at least one example pictured coming out of the mineral sidings near the Junction box, from the EVR line! So, why did we choose to use them? Well, we have a fairly confined space beside the shed, where we need a number of signals in a fairly short distance. The LMS designed these ground signals (or dollies) that could be stacked on top of one another, following Midland and LNWR practices. The LNER design did not allow this, and instead you would place signals behind one another, set at different heights. We don't have the distances for that to work here, as we need two doubles, almost face to face, with a pretty short length of track between them. So, it's a case of "needs must...

The frame for use in the S&D box is one built by I'Ansons / the NER (we're still unsure exactly who did / designed what, but it would be fair to say it was a joint effort), was originally in use at Pesspool and comprises of 22 levers. The quadrants laid out as they will sit in the box, with the big lumps beside which are the pivot supports Pretty much the signaller's view All the bolts have now been removed from the pivot support castings (these sit low down, and link between the stanchions) and the lever quadrants (which you see at floor level in the box). Whilst we will require an additional 17 (I think...) bolts for the quadrants, all the rest will require cleaning and treating, but can then be reused. The pivot support bolts are all reusable too. Jim, on his return, gets to grips undoing the bolts which we have now popped into safe storage You may remember that Mr Ferrari took some of the quadrants away for cleaning and painting with the children: we now have all th...

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...