Sir Nigel Gresley overhaul – update 7

In The Works, the overhaul of Nigel Gresley continues. Locomotive Engineer Darrin Crone provides us with an insight of the previous couple of weeks’ work.

This is the seventh update –you can catch up on the previous posts here.

Week commencing 29 August


The examination of the frames continued this week. On Tuesday the brackets that support the footplating from the frames were thoroughly cleaned. They have been cleaned before but required another visit prior to removing the paint, after which a detailed inspection of these castings can be carried out. After cleaning they were needle gunned to remove all the paint.


With the frames stripped detailed examination is possible. On the frames is a brass plate showing that the loco carried experimental nuts on it’s slidebars.


Cleaning and needle gunning has been carried out elsewhere on the frames, and there’s now not much left to do behind the cylinders. On Wednesday the underneath of the bracket that supports the front vacuum cylinders was cleaned. This bracket can now be stripped of paint.

Work is now concentrating on the area around the cylinders. On Thursday the Engineering Team did a great job cleaning off the carbon deposits around the trailing face of the outside cylinder castings. There are still some awkward corners to get into, but a large surface area has been done. This will allow a detailed inspection to take place around the slidebar brackets and piston packing housings that are integrally cast on the cylinder.


Roger Turnbull cleaning the trailing side of the left hand cylinder.


Also this week, a detailed survey of the fasteners took place on the right hand side of the loco. It is fascinating to see the small markings, repairs, tool marks, pops and scribe marks that show the loco’s long history. As much of this as possible will be recorded. To help with this we were visited by our official photographer Trevor Camp. Using his very high class equipment he took some documentary photographs of the frames.

During the inspection process it was noticed that the leading right-hand combined spring hanger and brake shaft bracket is shimmed from the frames and there is a gap between the lower part of the side of the bracket and the frame. This bracket is a fabrication whereas the bracket on the left of the loco is a casting. As there is also an alignment issue with these brackets it was decided to remove the fabricated bracket for detailed examination and refitting. By the end of Saturday removal progressed to the point where it was clinging on with just one rivet.


One of the bogie spring beams is marked 2568 LNE. Locomotive 2568 was Sceptre which became 60069, perhaps another recycled component.


We continued to clean the bogie on the underside. We trialed the needle gun on it and a lot of the hard deposits chipped off, so we won’t need to manually scrape a large area of the underside of the bogie main frame casting. There doesn’t seem to be much paint on the underside, probably because it hasn’t been upside down since it was built.

On Saturday we ran our regular Junior Volunteers day. The locomotive injectors were cleaned by the JV’s for the first time and the Juniors were put to good use cleaning the cylinder bores prior to measurement.

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