Locomotive - We completed the annual electrical exams on the locomotive at the beginning of March.  The headlamps have had their annual clean and repaint, and the electrical gauges in the cab have been cleaned.  All internal inspections of electrical enclosures showed that the systems are currently surviving well.  In particular the changes made during the overhaul to improve the resilience of the wiring systems under both crew seats appear to have done what we intended.  A big win is that there is no sign of water and coal dust ingress into the fireman’s side conduit system, for the first time since the loco was built.

We scheduled the swapping of both turbogens for our spares.  These include one of the original Fabeg units, fitted with the new turbine wheel designed by Alan Parkin, together with the third new Meiningen one, built for the ETCS project.  The two replaced turbogens ran up well.  Both ran quietly under initial testing with no vibration or steam leaks.  It was particularly pleasing to test Alan’s new turbine wheel on steam for the first time.  We shall see how it performs during operations this year.

The tender ADA is currently off the vehicle awaiting modification to include the new clutch.  If you would like to see the ADA back on the locomotive very soon then do have a look at our new ‘Generating funds for the ADA’ Club, and join us if you can!  We have two working turbogens, with only one being required for normal main line operation, so our electrical resilience remains excellent.

Support Coach - The annual electrical exams were successfully completed in March.  As part of this we replaced the last batch of original smoke alarms, bringing the whole system up to date and finishing the replacement process that we started last year.  All the alarms are now good for another 10 years in service.

We also took the opportunity to inspect all our coach 16A shore power cables.  These have a hard life, being run out in yards and depots to power the coach system whenever we stop overnight.  The cables themselves were found to be sound but many of the connectors were in poor condition, so it was decided to replace them all.  This has now been done.