Another day, another NLE turn, this time starting from cold - there was no lunch train or Santa so Third Man Lewis arrived at 12:00 to light up, followed by me half an hour later. Lewis already had the fire going, so all I had to do was put the hose in the tender first checking to see it wasn't frozen solid, and fill up the guage lamp with paraffin. We set about the cab with rags, polishing the brass with Peek, nattering, comparing shovels and debating how much coal to take as we brough the boiler up to pressure to prepare for the two glasses blow down requested by Fitter Alan.
Having run out of coal once this year and suffering the associated heckling (probably for years to come), I wasn't too keen on 'winging it' with what we had in the tender, however tidy Lewis had made it:
In the end, we had that plus two more bucketloads which I trimmed forward to minimise our raking later. This may have been a bit of a mistake it continuously ran onto the cab floor whenever the shovel got close to the coaling plate...
We decided to take it in turns firing and as I wanted to prove to myself, after last week's debacle, that I could properly prepare the loco for disposal Lewis took the first trip and I headed off to the ground frame. There's a loco behind that cloud:
We trundled off up the line as dusk fell, flushing three red deer out of the undergrowth on the heath. I switched on the first three generators, and was abandoned at the third while Driver Christian went off back up the line to investigate a bang he had heard while coming down over Wind Pump.
Unfortunately, that trip yielded a bit of track damage - we took some pictures and sent them to the RO, and carried on down the line to start up the other generators.
Beyond Weybourne, we entered the microcosm enclosing Sheringham and it's peculiar weather system, and the sleet came down. The fourth generator was surrounded by a stinging 25 mph wind and driving sleet, the fifth wasn't much better but was a bit more enclosed in the trees. Lewis did the last one - perhaps he was worried about the hexagenarian fireman getting cold.
Down in Sheringham we filled up with water, hooked on and started the steam heating. I took over the fire and fed it a bit so we could get it warming up while we had tea and ordered our dinner.
It was ready by 16:50, a bit early really, but I kept the lid on it for another ten minutes without any blowing off but it wasn’t long before the crunch came - Driver Christian appeared with a second round of coffees and the news that the evening service had been cancelled.
So that was a short day.
By this time we were a bit famished; fortunately the lovely buffet crew wanted to make sure we were fed before we went, so we tucked in to our pizza, pastie and chips before heading up the line to turn the generators off.
With Lewis driving, we went up to switch off the bottom four generators since we couldn’t get to the top two and by the time we were done I had the boiler really full and the fire blazing; the boiler was still well in the top quarter when we were on the level pit for disposal. There was a lot of ash and a fair bit of clinker - it wasn’t steaming so freely on the way up; I’m going to have to work out how to deal with that. Last time I ran any length of time on ovoids I cleaned the fire every other trip.
As I write this, whilst the NLE service was wiped out for an evening the lunch service ran today (perhaps only to Weybourne) and I’ve just heard the problem has been fixed - good thing, because Passed Cleaner Lewis has his PC-Fireman assessment tomorrow.
My next turn is a Santa B on the 22nd - a very long turn with Driver Nick and Third Man Brad.
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