The following report comes courtesy of John Batley.
A glorious day, a 05.00 start up to chesterfield to meet Gareth, Keith and Alan At Barrow Hill at 08.00, first job after getting to Barrow Hill was a cuppa Tea and a bacon roll, after fueling up on Tea and butties we went into the roundhouse and got into our boiler suits ready to prep 56101, first job was to for Gareth to assess the oil loss from Saturdays crankcase door failier which flooded the bedplate with oil..nice!! we took 5 x 25lts of fresh oil to the loco and refilled the engine, Keith W then fitted a new gasket to the offending crankcase door and refitted it, once the oil was refilled ther next job was to drain the bedplate of water and oil..so yours truly had the lovely job of draining the oil out, this was done by filling the 25lt drums we used to refill the engine with fresh oil..6 drums later it was sorted. We then retired for a cuppa and had a look around at other locos on site at the gala. at around 10.30 56101 burst into life, much to the excitment of the punters on site, she certainly look and sounded the part, at around 11.30 Gareth took 56101 out of the stabling road to have her three turns on the ’shuttle’ train, all went well and it was nice to see 56101 breath as she climbed the demo track, there was a slight prob with the brake pipe as 56101 was showing over 5 bar on the dial, so it was a wait on the top of the demo line until the brakes bled of to 5 bar, but apart from that she performed brilliant, after the ’shuttle’ runs she was put back into the stabling sidings and checked over in the engine room to see if all crackcase doors were still in situ, all was ok. Later in the afternoon Gareth brought 56098 up to 56101 and i ‘multied’ them up to give the punters some serious ‘grid’ thrash, we put the loco’s into ‘maintenence’ and pulled the power handle back on 101, well talk about clag from 098!!
