The weekend of Septmber 25th and 26th will see the Barrow Hill roundhouse throw open it’s doors to a new type of event. The monthly magazine Model Rail with the support of Hornby are holding a Model Rail ‘Live’ event, to bring together both model railway enthusiasts and prototype railway enthusiasts alike. There will be a chance to see some high quality model layouts alongside some impressive prototypes in the roundhouse near Chesterfield. Please refer to website for details http://www.modelraillive.co.uk
The Class 56 Group have been invited along with their sales stand and it is also hoped that we will have our own loco, 56040 in attendance at the show. Along with the Class 58 group and their own 58016, this will no doubt bring back many memories of these two Barrow Hill stalwarts.
To go with the Class 56 groups stand, the group has built a small 4mm micro layout that is based on it’s in house magazines cartoon (Big Enders). Named ‘Arnold Lane’ after Pink Floyds first single release (Arnold layne), the layout has been built to show off it’s growing collection of model 56’s. Some of these model locos that have been weathered, renumbered and detailed will be sold off over the weekend to help raise further funds for the ongoing repairs of 56040.
The group encourages all members and non members alike, who have an interest in these big heavy haulers to come along and take a look inside and discover what it takes to keep these fine machines working and have a chat to those who have been involved with the restoration of 56040.
56040 on Arnold Lane – Photo by Keith Wright
56098 was rolled out of Barrow Hill on Saturday in it’s new guise of LoadHaul freight livery. The loco is due to move to Alleleys yard on Tuesday 16th Feb to swap bogies with 56056. Thanks to Gareth Broughton for the last 3 photos!
56098 outside Barrow Hill today. Thanks to David Dudley (http://daviddudley.fotopic.net/) for this photo.
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!!
