Autumn / Winter 2015
Due to the coach being largely "out of bounds" while the start of the lift was in progress, very little progress was made. The personnel were diverted on to Railtour maintenance and to improving the work area environment. It is amazing how long it takes to sort out boxes and boxes of assorted screws etc.
The teak rails which are required for the front and back of the luggage racks were manufactured. The front (outer) pole is 1 1/8" diameter and 6' 1'2 long, so teak was sliced up into 1 1/8" square section pieces, then run throught the spindle moulder with a "C" shaped cutter twice to create a round pole. The pole at the back which holds the netting in place is 5/8" diameter, so more teak was sliced up as 5/8" square section. Unfortunately, we only have a 3/4" "C" shaped cutter for the spindle moulder so we had to run the square section pieces four times through the router which had a suitable 1/4 section round cutter, then sanded the resultant "round" pole to obtain an acceptable round section pole. 16 front and 16 rear section poles were required for the 8 compartments - this used up a frightening quantity of teak!
Due to other committments, the body lifting made very slow progress. Above you can see it has reached 2-3" off the chassis. Lifting at this point was halted due to the discovery of a small amount of "heritage insulation material" (asbestos) under the west toilet. The area was screened off with polythene while the problem was dealt with, but of course, this caused further delay.
Another door which was removed to lighten the body for the lift was the west end toilet
door. When removed it was almost black with years of grime and heaven knows how many thick coats of varnish.
After scraping and sanding, a thin coat of varnish was applied to seal the door for its period of storage before
being "properly" varnished then re-hung.