The Society operates from its base at Bo'ness on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth a few miles west of the Forth Bridges. As well as restoring historically important coaches and rolling stock, the department is also responsible for the day to day maintenance and refurbishment of the Bo'ness line stock and the SRPS Railtour Set of Mk1 coaches to main line standard.

The Railtour set consists of a rake of 14 Mk1 coaches as follows:

13230 photographed soon after completion of a repaint in spring 2018.

Winter 2005/6 saw the upgrading of FO's 3096 and 3115. The seats in 3096 were being recovered and a new carpet fitted. 3115 interior was "repaired" - the various missing and damaged pieces of woodwork being attended to by the late A. McLeod. Both gangways had to be removed and the crash posts repaired due to extensive corrosion - this involves a bunch of work fixing up the interior trim which had to be removed to facilitate this exercise. New battery boxes had to be fitted due to corrosion.

The two brake vehicles 21241 and 35185 have had their wiring modified to add a 24v DC inverter (to 230v AC) which is used to power a domestic freezer used to store perishable food on some of the longer railtours.  This has proved an invaluable additional storage facility as the capacity of the refrigerator in the RBR is limited.  Although the freezer consumes only about 300w when running, the inverter used is a 1500w model.  This apparent over-capacity is necessary to supply the very large surge current required to get the freezer compressor running from stopped.  The inverter is run directly from the dynamo (as was the pie heater in these vehicles) so the freezer is only on when the coach is travelling at 30mph or above.

We experimented with a vacuum cleaner run from the inverter when the train was running ECS so that the train could be cleaned more easily than using the brush and dustpan technique.  The cleaner unfortunately proved too large a load for the dynamo which was asked to run at 60-80 amps continuously for quite some time.  The commutator partially melted becoming eccentric as a couple of segments rose up.  This in turn caused the brushes to bounce off the commutator.  This was sort of OK at slow speed, but down the ECML at 100mph the brushes bounced so hard they shot up their holders and stayed there thus disconnecting the dynamo.

The cure for this problem was to motor the dynamo with the coach connected to a land supply and apply a commutator block borrowed from the diesel department to smooth the commutator down again.  After several hours of "turning" the commutator was smooth enough for the dynamo to be passed fit again.  We won't be trying vacuuming the train again for a while!  BCK 21241 was used for the branchline service for a while but was back in main line service in 2018.

Since 2018 Jim Ormiston has been repairing and painting some of the Railtour vehicles. Several roofs have required considerable attention, and some vehicles a complete repaint - see photo above.