Signalling at the Strathspey Railway: Morley project part 3

Morley project part 3 03/06/20

Hello all,

Has been another productive week of lock down. Unfortunately there is not much to show for it. A lot of it has been tidying up and making things look better. With the weather being SO hot, work turned to the preparation of the signal for coming out of the sidings. In the hot sun managed to scrap the signal down to bare metal and the paint it up. With it being so hot, managed to get two coats on and touch dry before leaving the site.

Signal before been scrapped and cleaned up.

Signal all cleaned up ready for painting.

White paint done, still needs black paint at the bottom

White paint done, all round the post. Black paint still required.

As the week carried on and the weather got cooler, attention turned back to the points. Between Georgie and myself, we managed to heat treat the kicker bar on the A end of the points. With this done the movement of the points is much better and it now has the required gap in the railway specification.

Moving to the B end. The real problem solving end! This type of turn out, our “P-way supervisor” and myself have only ever seen this set up in a book. Making it a little harder to understand what is needed to put it all together, making it quite a challenge. But we will not be beaten! With blunt drill bits and lots of measuring twice, or several times until two reading are the same. We finally managed to get the stretcher bar in place and secured. I must say that I am certainly very pleased with how it has come out.
The next problem that had to be sorted, was the switches required to be drilled. To take the drop lugs for the mechanical detector of the points for the signal. Sounds easy but trying to measure on something that is not quite flat and a little different to the other with a 1mm tolerances for the holes to the bolts. Well all I can say is “got it spot on”. Measure lot’s of times drill once.