The trouble with a brake van

Under normal circumstances, I am generaly full of praise for the BR standerd MK1 brake vans, I find them comfortable, user friendly, and warm, but when they are bad, they can be very bad!
Arriving at Kidderminster to work the 10.30 train on the 29th of December 2008, I was quite pleased to see that I had a rake of Mark ones.
I had had the same set two days pervious, and was well aware that the in-swinging guard's door was catching the floor on one side, you can imagine my surprise, when I found I could not budge it at all today, now I am not exactly a six stone weed, so my shoulder against something normally moves it. Eventually, I managed to open it by dropping the window, putting my shoulder under it, and lifting.
I now turned my attention to getting into the guard's compartment, as again, I had noted that the sliding door was a bit ropey, and had mentioned to my ticket inspector two days previous, that it would only need a heavy handed guard to pull it off it's rail. Needless to say, it only warrented a slight raise of the eyebrows, when I found that was exactly what had happened, what did bring the utterence of several expleatives was when I went to the other window, and found it was jammed. Several minutes of swearing later, it was free, but I was not a happy man, and while the offending window was moving, it was very stiff.
I settled down to a day of cursing and swearing, and getting round the problems that the coach clearly had.
Somewhere around Highley, I noticed I was splashing around in water, a quick inspection of the van, revealed a lovely leek on the radiator, meaning I could either Isolate it and be cold, or splash round in a puddle all day. I chose the puddle, but I was getting slowly grumpier, my bag was sat in a puddle, as were my boots.
The rest of the day went quite well, all things considered, untill we put the lights on on the train at Bridgnorth, it became apparent that our poorly coach also had some very sick batteries. The lights in the corridor were just about on, and in the van, my oil lamp was providing more light than the electric lights. The crowning glory was when we returned to Kidderminster, and I went to turn the lights off, but the low batteries meant the lights would not switch off. Having scrabbled round under the coach to take the contacts out with the emergency over ride switch, and phoned the duty officer to get C&W to put it on charge, rapidly, I stormed off for a nice calming pint!

 

thats one fault record card i would love to have read the comments on.

 

The comments were short and to the point! Why waste a sentence when one four letter word will do it!

 

Every time I do a guards turn I run out of room on the fault sheet on the back of the journal. All our coaches have sick batts!!

We now only have one BG in traffic thanks to vandals. Was only repainted last November. Looked lovely but the vandals must have thought it was ready for a repaint. Windows included. Also did the Midlander bar coach too ](*,)

 

Not good. We have trouble with vandals on the Stourport Line, so we only ever put Iron and Steel bodied wagons, and wrecks awaiting repair up there