Introduction :

We’ve had Reefsteamers beavering away at the Germiston Steam Locomotive Depot all week, as well as a large crew of casual labourers working on the yard clearing project and providing environmentally friendly propulsive power for the tool trolley. Fred ‘Sparky’ Sewell got to continue on his finishing-up work on the beautiful new Club House, which has worked out very well.  It’s hard to believe it was once a derelict ablution block.  Our main planned project for this Saturday Depot Day was originally to be a combination of axle bearing work and re-installing the overhauled stoker motor on the Sandstone Estates GMAM Garrett No.4079 ‘Lyndie Lou.’ 

Best laid plans … And all that.

Our little green critter of a diesel shunter suddenly ended up on the sick list with a damaged jack-shaft drive gear.  It’s been an awkward time to have the shop shunter out of action.  We have been making a lot of rolling stock movements, including revenue earning work for the Shongololo Express.  The Booth steam crane No.96 ‘Shosholoza also had to be moved to help clear scrap metal and to be used to finally get our enormous 7 ton Dean Smith lathe into its proper position in the main workshop.  Class 15CA No.2056 ‘Dorothy’ has been in steam all week – having the fires nearly completely dumped every night, a small bank made up and a fresh fire lit-up from the embers under a still-warm boiler in the morning to raise steam once again.  (We can’t ask volunteers to do loco minding during the week as they have to come in from work and then go to work the next day – with a night of no sleep or just cat naps.) 

The 150HP Hunslet Shunter uses a single speed gearbox with manually selected forward and reverse.  It also incorporates the final drive gear train, which consists of 90 degree bevel gears and a final reduction set to drive the counterweighted jackshaft that turn the two axles via simple external coupling rods.  The gearbox is prone to moisture contamination within the gearbox oil, as it is poorly vented.  The fact that the diesel is usually stored outside is another factor – we’ll be storing it under cover from now on.  (Now that the depot has been sorted out, we have the covered track space.)  It appears that as the bearings were wearing on the jack shaft, the gears physically moved further apart, destroying the mutual relationship of the involuted curve geometry and driving only on the gear crests.  One of the gears stripped and the little green critter has lost its drive.  He was shunted into the number 4 road of the workshop, occupying the tracks recently vacated by Class 15F No.2914 ‘Spikkels’ and worked on immediately. 

Within the depot workshop, we had three work teams working in two adjacent tracks.  Michael Thiel worked on and contorted himself around the GMAM stoker motor, Dawie Viljoen and Shaun Ackerman focused on the Bissel Axle replacement therapy while Patrick Ackerman and Kenny Allen worked on the shunter.  Andrew King was supervising the jacking and blocking of the tender of Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’ as we prepare for bogie overhaul and undercarriage cleaning. 

An exceptionally busy day with much action – so let’s read on about what was happening…

PROJECT : Disengaging the Hunslet Taylor gearbox :

The little green critter eventually gave birth to a red critter that held on tightly to mamma with every bolt, flange and shaft at its disposal!  Read on how Drs Ackerman and Allen performed the reluctant caesarian. 

Preparing the locomotive for gearbox removal was crude work, as befits the technology of a 1952 model, but the work wasn’t a mental brain buster.  But the gearbox itself is a surprisingly bulky unit that takes up most of the under floor space of the cab.  The longitudinal pilot shaft and the counter shaft lie in vertical orientation to each other, and the transverse jack drive shaft, with the characteristic external counterweights, lies below the center line.  Thus, there’s 3 ‘layers’ of shafts in the housing.  The final drive after the bevel gear is through triple gears, including the large fixed-ratio reduction gearing required to amplify the torque.  Our boys ended up trying to remove a tall, long heavy unit that wouldn’t move backwards and wouldn’t move down.  And then, on the following day, it couldn’t be traversed through the wheel drop pit without some extensive jacking operations.  It made the dropping and traversing the Bissel Trucks on the GMAM Garrett No.4079 ‘Lyndie Lou’ look fairly simple by comparison. 

In the preparatory obstetrics, the center section of the shunter’s wooden cab floor had already been lifted, consisting of several well-weathered 1 inch thick hardwood planks.  (Pic A01 below)  Actually, those floor boards came in very useful later on as narrow hard-wood packing shims under the buffer beams!  The gearbox has two plain flat rectangular inspection plates which were unbolted and removed to reveal the interior for a somewhat gloomy inspection by the Chief Engineer, Andrew ‘Noddy’ King.  The gear teeth and those of the bevel gear set were found to be in reasonable condition.  This is a constant mesh gearbox – forward and reverse being engaged by dog clutches, which displayed moderate wear as can be expected after 56 years of operation.  Being a constant mesh gearbox, the main gear wheels in the drive-line are not physically shifted longitudinally in and out of mesh, thus little wear is evident.  (This is actually a more advanced system than the reverse gear of many modern road cars, which still use an intermediate gear that is actually slid in and out of mesh.)

The three through-bolts for the pilot drive coupling were undone and the engine half of the coupling slightly retracted.  The gearbox is connected to the torque converter via a short, shallow-angled universal-jointed shaft, so it was easy to ‘bend’ the shaft and swing the engine half of the pilot coupling upwards and away from its mate.  The loose drive shaft was chained to the throttle cross-rod that spans the cab between the two throttle levers.  (This locomotive’s cab is ‘dual control’, the throttle and gear lever controls being duplicated on both sides.  As the brake wheel is on the left, we usually run this engine ‘left hand drive’ – opposite to that of our steamers.)  You can see the light weight chain to the middle-right of Pic A01.  (Above)

The first wrinkle in the operation was that the pairs of clamping bolts for the dual gear levers were not accessible from within the cab.  The gearbox would have to be dropped with those long red levers still attached and they would eventually only be uncoupled and removed at about 4pm the following day. 

The coupling rods were then removed.  This being a ‘little’ two axle locomotive, this was a relatively simple operation and the main rods were removed with the jackshaft sections still attached.  (Pic A02 above)  This is going to be a good opportunity to check out those bearings and try to knock out a few more clanks.  The walkways alongside the engine hood provided very convenient shelving for those coupling rods.  Patrick and Kenny then started removing the gearbox bolts themselves, being careful to leave enough loose bolts in place to hold the weight of the gearbox.  (Which is just a bit much for the hard hats to handle.)  Because the gearbox on this locomotive also incorporates the final drive, it must handle the torque reaction and the counter-thrust imposed by the coupling rod sets – hence its robust design.  The design uses a series of bolts located in 3 planes to transmit the drive forces and distribute them into the frames.

All the gearbox fasteners were hexagon bolts with equally hexagonal nuts – no captive bolts were used.  No rivets were used either, a major blessing in that confined space.  But the double ended fasteners all naturally required the use of two spanners, with some creative use of assorted pipes, gwala bars and wood blocks to wedge spanners into place.  The spokes of the primary drive wheels (rear axle) provided many convenient blocking points.  Patrick Ackerman quickly realised that the diagonal bracing for the cab steps would get in the way, so he hauled himself out the inspection pit and got to work ‘de-bracing’ the steps while Kenny Allen continued to work on the intermediate bolts.  (Pic A03 above)

Kenny Allen isn’t a frequent fixture at the Germiston Depot, as he is away studying Mechanical Engineering in Stellenbosch.  However, he is a committed, popular young Reefsteamer and is willing to use some of his usually rare holiday time to spend a day getting greasy with us at the Depot.  He is competent both with his hands and on the footplate – and he is always a welcome sight amongst the regulars.  Kenny … it’s appreciated.

Now that I’ve embarrassed Kenny, (Safely at the opposite end of the country!) back to the commentary.  Eventually both the youngsters got the step brackets off.  Only one end of those braces were bolted, the other end welded.  So they had to be ground off and will need to be re-welded to the step backing plates upon re-assembly.  With no braces, the double steps would swing inwards if one attempted to mount them – a uncomfortable feeling when the steps in question are dangling over an open wheel dropping pit.  The long defunct sanding gear boxes and the drop-pipes were removed as well.  A further issue arose when it was found that the upper bolts on the leading wing flange are obstructed by the axle boxes behind the wheels.  There was a bolt behind the leaf springs too and it could not be reached. 

This job was about to get a lot more interesting….

The Chief Engineer was called in for advice and it got crowded under those frames with four of us under there.  The decision was made to drop the rear axle to be able to access and remove those bolts.  Remember that the coupling rods had already been removed so the job was actually simple.  The wheel drop pit’s jack was pressurized and used to lift up the axle while the simple 2-bolt axle box keep plates were removed.  (Pic A05 above)  The axle had to be lifted to compress the leaf springs, get the weight off the axle boxes and to disengage the wheels from the pit’s bridge rails.  The next step was to open up the wheel drop pits and to uncouple the two bridge rails.  (Pic A06 above)  Opening the wheel drop pit is never too easy a task as the expanded mesh covers gets wedged in their channels over time, with all the tromping and walking going on overhead.

With a minimum of swearing and no mangled fingers, the cover was removed and the now-unloaded bridge rails moved aside in a classic two handed wriggle.  The rear wheels dropped cleanly (Pic A07 below) and the last awkward gearbox mounting bolts were able to be removed – with the assistance of 2 feet of boiler tube as a spanner extension.  I’ve often said that we Reefsteamers don’t miss much.  If Reefsteamers were pork butchers, we’d use the entire pig except the squeal.  And in this case, we didn’t miss the opportunity to lubricate the axle horn guides.  (Pic A08 below.)  Another ‘pig squeal’ job was the scraping and cleaning of the axle box keep plates before jacking the axle back in and refitting the keep plates.  (Pic A09 below)  They presented little trouble, each only being held on with two bolts.  Jacking the axle and guiding the freely pivoting gearboxes back into the horns was, as always, a three man job.

With this done and the two axle boxes all buttoned up once more, the wheel drop pit’s bridge rails could be grunted back into place and the rather battered fishplates re-bolted.  The pit jack could now be retracted, and freed up ready to block up the gearbox’s sump.  This meant that the entire locomotive had to be moved forward – so the brakes were screwed back and a pair of pinch bars used to line the gearbox up with the pit jack.  (The rear axle crosses the frames in front of the gearbox – remember this point as it comes up later!)

Now a wood block could be fitted between the sludge sump and the oil pan, and the gearbox carefully nudged upwards to take the weight off the last few bolts holding it in place.  Because the pit jack has extra brackets and braces on the working head, which fouled with the deep sludge sump, the jack’s head had to be cut down to a simple U-shape to complete the job.  (Pic A10 below)  So the acetylene torch was brought out to modify the jack before the gearbox could be propped.  Reefsteamers often modify their own tools to suit the purpose.

The propping had to be done very carefully, as if the pit jack was allowed to be over-extended, you’d end up lifting the weight of the entire rear half of the locomotive with the frames literally hanging on the gearbox, possibly bending or shearing those bolts, and fracturing the castings.  The gearbox was propped and the bolts removed.  However, the front wing flanges of the gearbox got hung up on the protruding axle boxes.  (Pic A11 below)  There was insufficient movement to move the gearbox backwards to clear the axle boxes – so the Hunslet mechanics were a bit stuck. 

As it would be dangerous to tilt the gearbox on the stand, it was decided to tilt the locomotive relative to the gearbox.  At the same time, the jacking would be necessary, anyway, to suspend the locomotive once more as the bridge rails would need to be removed again.  (To allow the protruding counterweights and drive pins of the jack shaft to pass through.)   A pair of small ‘Buda’ bottle jacks were extended under the rear buffer beam.  (Pic A12 above)  These ‘small’ jacks have a 25 ton capacity, which, in steam locomotive terms, is as light as a ballerina’s lunchbox.  The upward movement would have the effect of swinging those obstructed flanges back from the axle boxes and downwards.  Unfortunately, there was insufficient clearance at the back of the frames to allow the front end of the gearbox to clear. 

After some head scratching consultation with the Chief Engineer, who lost a few more of his increasingly sparse grey hair in the process, it was decided to literally cut down the protruding wing flanges by a few millimeters to clear the axle box.  It’s rather a drastic solution but as the mounting arrangements are massively over-engineered, the loss of metal would be insignificant.  Soon, the workshop resounded to the sound of a nervous Patrick cutting down those flanges with a small disked angle grinder and trying frantically not to accidently cut weakening grooves into the frames. 

In fact, he left a thin web of metal on the outer flanks and chiseled the pieces off.  I couldn’t get a decent shot of the angle grinder work due to the close quarters.  But check out how the spark trails flew up past the gearbox, through the floorboards and into the cab in Pic A14.  (Above) 

With the wing flanges slightly cut down and some very judicious wriggling, the massive, clumsy gearbox housing could be removed.  It was gently lowered on the jack, the flat surface of the oil pan and neatly protruding sludge sump neatly interlocking with the jacking block and thus helping stability.  You can see a neat end view in Pic A15 (above)  As the box was lowered on the jack, the drive coupling and the rear axle tried to occupy the same space (Pic A16 below)   – which is now why you know I told you to note the axle position.  .  It was at this point the work team packed it in for the day and got busy tidying up.  The day’s Magaliesburg train would be coming in at about 6pm and the engine (Class 15CA) would need to be coaled up and serviced.  Andrew, meanwhile, could investigate the strategic situation and what tools would be required to remove that obstructive main shaft.

The project continued at a more relaxed pace on the following day (Sunday) with the removal of that main shaft and the blocked coupling half.  (Pic A17 above)  Fortunately there was enough room to pull the shaft forward between the empty frames, over the axle and under the drive shaft area.  With the main shaft and the pilot coupling gone, the gearbox could be lowered even more.  But ‘even more’ wasn’t enough as the wheel drop pit jack then dismally bottomed out.  (Pic A18 above)  Great.  The little green critter was turning out to be a big monster. 

One of the old sack trolleys was pressed into service and a choice assortment of wooden blocks were fetched.  One advantage of a recently cleaned workshop is that one at least knows where the tools are!  Patrick and Lee jacked up the engine – first with a large 50 ton ‘Buda’ jack under the front coupler base and the rear end on blocks, in a tripod arrangement.  Whenever we Reefsteamers jack a railed vehicle, we constantly mix and match the wood blocks to try and get their top end as close to the buffer beam or frame as possible – so should the jack slip or collapse, there’s a minimal distance for the load to fall.  It slows the job down, switching the wooden blocks in and out … but safety first.  You can seriously hurt yourself with all this weighty equipment!

With the locomotive’s front end supported on two sets of blocks, the rear end was then jacked up using the coupler base.  We ended up with both the jack and the supporting blocks based on cross beams spanning the inspection pit.  It meant a heavier load on the jack (and the operator) but eliminated the need to coordinate two jacks for stability.  This method maintains a tripodal arrangement that is automatically self leveling – like a three legged milkmaid’s stool.  Lee and Patrick took it in turns but Lee ‘Flash’ Gates eventually took over the operation.  (Pic A19 above)  Poor Patrick had tacked a lunchtime Cornish Pasty, which tackled him right back.  With all the calisthenics of operating a jack, he quickly felt nauseous, working slower and slower, visibly deteriorating until the pie finally defeated him and he disappeared discretely to the toilets to blow his chunks. 

Patrick came back, black of eyes and white of face while we were disconnecting the dual gear lever rods.  The height that we’d gained in jacking the locomotive relative to the bottomed out jack meant that the gear levers, clearly visible in Pic A20 (above) could now be removed.  This was an in-and-out job, as it’s really not a good idea to work under a suspended lump like this, as stable as it may seem.  Fortunately the double-bolted clamps would be easy to remove.

Well, with the protruding gearlevers removed, and the locomotive perched on wooden blocks, the gearbox was now free to move out from under the frames and from under the rear wheels.  The I-Beam wheel channel and the bridge rails were moved off to one side to clear the entire wheel pit to the right of the locomotive.  Meanwhile, the dismembered gearbox was ratchet-strapped to the base of the wheel pit’s jack for safety.  (Pic A22 below)  It wouldn’t do to have this lump rolling off the jack in transit.  Traversing the gearbox went without incident.  Patrick just sat miserably on a drum, his sensitivity to cold not being helped by a thin overall, and his stomach doing it’s best to scramble up his esophagus. 

The LPG gas powered Hyster forklift was fired up and brought up to the wheel pit.  Two blocks of wood were placed to provide an extra few inches of surface for the front wheels to extend the reach as far as possible.  (Pic A23 below)  Two 6 ton capacity lifting straps were used to hoist the load out of the pit, and it the lifting went smoothly in two increments.  The load hardly swung and we didn’t even leave any red paint on the pit wall. 

Andrew then backed up the gas forklift, Patrick moving out of the way, looking even sicker with the LPG carbon-monoxide fumes.  I assumed he was instinctively crawling off to find somewhere quiet and private to die … until I got a whiff of those fumes myself.  The forklift was backed all the way up the workshop area.  It was done in little increments and with gentle brake applications, as not to cause the heavy load to start penduluming in suspension.  (Pic A25) the load was parked at the storeroom end of the workshop, which has recently been cleared of junk and spares in the recent cleanup.  The only obstacle encountered was a ½ ton inglenook hoist that had to be rotated out the way to clear the raised fork tower of the forklift.  When the hoist would be swing back, it would provide a convenient, safe location to attach a block and tackle to dismantle the gearbox. 

The gearbox was gently lowered – and laid to rest on a pile of carefully selected wood blocks to fit in alongside the sharply rectangular sump and hold the unit stable.  (Pic A26 below)  We were then interrupted by the Sunday train coming home and needing to be serviced.  But distractions aside, it wasn’t forgotten to mark off the open wheel drop pits with yellow tape.  (Pic A27 below.)

SIA TASK : GMAM Garrett No.4079 ‘Lyndie Lou’ – Bissel Axle bearings:

‘Lyndie Lou’s’ reconditioned Bissel truck has been sitting out under the traverse workshop gantry crane for several months – just the teensy problem of a missing axle being the hold up.  Today the new axle bearings were to be fitted.  The donor axle had been mainly stripped and cleaned several months ago, and stored with greased journals.  So there was little preparation between unwrapping Lyndie’s new presents and getting them onto the axles.  These are NTN bearings, and cost R6000 per set of a pair of double taper bearings.  (Pic B01 below)

The conical inner race of the old inner bearings had been left on the journals though and these had to be removed.  Because it’s backed right up against the rear seal plate, the conical inner race alone cannot be withdrawn with a puller and has to be split in order to open it up enough to get over the axle journal.  (Pic B02 below)  Old ‘Swak hart’ Viljoen did the first of the whole day’s worth of angle grinding work.  These bearing races are hard, and have a healthy appetite for grinding disks.  You can see a cut progressing nicely in Pic B02 below, but can also see the problem when the angle grinder disk reaches the rear – it would mean you cut grooves in the axle box back plate.  Thus, an angle grinder was used to initially weaken the conical race, and then a chisel driven into the groove towards the back plate to finally split the race.  These races loosened up without having to be broken completely in half and could be withdrawn along the journal. 

Pic B03 above shows the results – like an old experienced granny squirrel cracking nuts, Dawie did a neat job of getting these races cracked.  But Pic B03 (above) also illustrates a problem.  The inner race spacer, shown on the right, also had to be split to get it off and these don’t come in the bearing packs.  Dawie had to re-weld, grind and close up each one of the journal spacers that he removed.

Getting the bearings on involved heating up the new bearings to expand them enough to get them over the axle journal.  This is a tricky operation involving the carefully evenly spread application of an acetylene torch – fitted with a heating nozzle.  (Pic B04 below)  Not only does one have to heat the bearing evenly, but it is vital not to overheat the steel - otherwise the tempering is lost and the brand new bearing is basically scrap, as good as it still may look.  The usual way to judge the heat is by spitting on the bearing and waiting for the saliva to start bubbling.  That’s the ideal temperature.  If the saliva skitters on the surface or just boils off, the bearing is already too hot and need to be allowed to cool.  The problem is that it is such a nerve wracking job that the mouth goes dry and there’s often no saliva ‘on tap’ with which to test the bearing!

It took Dawie three hot-fingered attempts to try and get the bearing on, (Pic B05 below) before he gave up and left it to cool on the old spacer and got up in disgust.  (Complaining about his ‘Swak Knie’ (Weak Knees) )  Apart from the risk of burning your hands, even with welding gloves – should the bearing cool down enough to contract on the shaft and grip in the wrong position – the inner race needs to be tapped off.  The contraction problem is compounded if one has put the bearing on skew.  And even in a stubborn but dead-straight application, the mass of the axle journal acts as a heat sink, resulting in an undesirable cooling that speeds up contraction, thus rapidly shortening the working time and making it increasingly harder to put the bearing on.  As big and as robust as these railway axle bearings appear, it is quite possible to wreck a new example before you even get it on.

The job was enlivened by a popping and misfiring acetylene torch, which wasn’t running properly with the newly fitted general heating nozzle.  (Pic A06 above)  When these torches mis-fire, they quite literally pop and bang, startlingly loud in the echoing confines of the workshop.  Shaun ‘Smudge’ Ackerman got the torch to behave eventually, without singing off his 4 day harvest of whiskers. 

The advice of the Chief Engineer was sought, and Andrew King toddled over from the next track from where he was supervising the jacking of Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’s’ tender.  The Locomotive Doctor prescribed some time doing more axle polishing and dressing.  Dawie was just able to get the bearing over the end chamfers on the journals – which left some fine score marks.  So Shaun Ackerman dressed the chamfers on both axles with a fine file, while Dawie Viljoen got going with strips of very fine 1000 grit emery paper to polish up the axle journal.  (Pic B07 above)

The cleaning and polishing of the axle journal did the trick and the new bearings slipped into place on the next attempt to heat and expand them.  The next challenge was to source a set of properly sized inner race spacers as the existing ones had been split to get them off.  In hopes of finding a pair of freebies, the LPG gas powered Hyster forklift was fired up and used to bring one of the original GMAM Garrett axles from out the back lot and into the working area.  (Pic B09 above)  I was surprised to see the forklift run as I’d assumed it wasn’t operatable.  I was impressed that in managed to get over the track in combinations of forward and reverse, and opposite steering locks.  It didn’t hang up on the rails and the differential didn’t trap the vehicle with one wheel spinning idly in the air.  I’ve driven forklifts before – on a military job that required the use of forklifts as self-propelled step-ladders in SADF ammunition bunkers.  They’re not as easy to drive as they look, especially with the rear wheels doing the steering.  Each one of us had a forklift assigned to personal use … and I remember the forklift races…

But back to the present.  This original GMAM axle was the one that alerted us to the initial Bissel truck problem on the Garret, with seriously worn and sharpened flanges.  As the axle was taken out of service, no one had bothered to strip the bearings.  And thus, the inner bearing spacers were still in place.

Dawie got stuck in with the stripping and the whacking to get the outer bearing dismantled before the spacer could be withdrawn.  It’s a brutal process, requiring that the finely machined bearing cage be sliced through in two places and literally levered apart until the rollers drop out.  (Pic B10 below)  The inner race was removed by splitting it at the top, and then hammering from the side, (3 o’ clock position) with an apposing mallet held as a dolly on the opposite end.  (9 o’ clock position)  The effect would be to crack the high tensile steel – instead of going through the schlep of cutting through the extremely hard material the second time.  The inner spacer was split and removed – and found to be of adequate length to fit between the new bearings on the donor axle.  However, the split inner races had to have the cut areas cleaned up and welded closed again.  This was done with a grinder (Pic B11 below) with attention to not only grind the circumferential corners flush, but to prepare the ends for welding.  Welding was done with an inverter welder and the loss of a few rods (which we found when cleaning up at night)  (Pic B12 below)  Dawie found the half-shell welding goggles a bit uncomfortable, but didn’t take the chances of welding with exposed eyes. 

The bearings were assembled on both ends with the newly fitted inner bearing race spacers.  The castellated locking collars were installed too, to snug everything up to working pressures.  But before these were fitted, their castellated slots had to be cleaned and straightened.  (Pic B13 below)  We had to use a mallet and wedge to get these off, which damaged the working surfaces a bit.  The railways had a custom made tool for this wok – none of which we Reefsteamers got with the depot. 

Before the semi circular outer race spacers were fitted into the screwed in bearings, special care was taken to measure the distances between the outer bearings.  (Pic B14 below)  At the same time, the outer races were pulled flat against their bearing rollers and measurements were made at various quadrants to ensure that the bearing has been put on straight and true.  (All measurements the same.)  We used an inside micrometer to transfer the measurements to a conventional outside micrometer and got measurements down to two places beyond the decimal.  That GMAM has never run so straight and smoothly as she will when we’re done with her!

The semi circular outer bearing race spacers were individually cleaned up (Pic B15 below) and measured as well, to be fitted to suit the gap.  Unfortunately, the axles, inner and outer race spacers and obviously, the new bearings, have never been run together so very careful matching had to be done. 

The spacers were found to be suitable for the axle at one end only.  The spacer was laid aside for machining.  To get the job moving, Shaun fitted the end locking plate that positively engages the castellated slots and prevent the ring from turning loose.  The originals had been moved and possibly even dumped in the depot clearing project, possibly by someone who didn’t know what they were.  Shaun found a pair of spares and fettled one of them to fit.  (Pic B16 below) the two lock-down bolts were cleans and lubed and tightened right up.  Then the bearing clearances had to be tested once again to check that the relative spacing hadn’t changed. 

Shaun then began cleaning and preparing the axle box, beginning with a good wipe down.  The working surfaces didn’t clean up too well and required some emery paper to come up acceptably for intimate contact with our nice posh, shiny, blingy new bearings.  Two of the studs were missing and some of the others were loose.  Upon cleaning, both the axle box (Pic B17 below) and the assembled bearing (Pic B18 below) were coated in white grease.  This will serve to protect the bare steel while the axle is standing idle and the boxes have yet to be filled up with grease. 

Putting the axle box back on required two people to guide it by the horn guides, one fellow to guide it over the backing plate and one fellow to tap it on with wooden block.  This contraption is heavy and obviously rotates freely on those bearings.  The job was done quickly, but some of the studs needed attention right behind the wheel which slowed down assembly.  So at least one set of bearings have been done.  The other set were measured once more and the semi-circular outer bearing race spacers handed to Dawie for machining down during the week.  The open bearings were then slathered in delicious onion-soup coloured white grease and wrapped in the plastic bag in which the bearings came in the packing box.

We have the AGM next week, followed by an arranged social ‘braai’ (BBQ) for the entire club.  Although no alcohol will be consumed by those who would be working in the depot while the socializing is going home, it’s likely that a morning of sitting and then stuffing oneself with meat will have a soporific effect.  We hope to get the axle fully assembled with both sets of bearings and back into the Bissel truck.  Our plan is to run the GMAM Garrett No.4079 ‘Lyndie Lou’ on a debut Magaliesburg run at the end of this month! 

SIA Project – Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’ Tender Inspection :

Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’ stuck her cow catcher into the action again, or more accurately, the tender.  The fact that the brakes would never operate quite right meant quite some time was spent underneath and checking the running gear.  The tender turned out to be in shabby condition deep down below the newly braced and welded coal space.  The jacking was performed by Edward with supervision from Andrew King – and some drilling concerning the use of sequential blocking for safety in case a jack fails. 

The brake rigging was found to be rusted and misaligned.  The under frames have much surface corrosion and the packing between the frames and the water tank is in poor conidtion.  The tender was uncoupled from the engine and jacked up at the front end.  (Pic S01 below)  The front bogie has been removed for inspection.  The bogies are to be cleaned and sealed on all internal surfaces.  The brake rigging is to be repaired (Already underway) and the springs + hangers are to be inspected.  Each one of the triple axles are to be individually removed, the axle boxes stripped and the bearing sets checked for pitting and damage.  Care will be taken to mark and return the axle boxes back onto the axle journals from whence they came.  While the bogies are out, the sections of the tender’s framing above and around the bolster pins will be scraped back and cleaned.

The interconnections between the engine and the tender include, from left to right : (Pic So2 below)

1). The LHS injector feed-water pipe.  (Feed from tender’s water tank)

2). The LHS safety chain.

3). The McLaughlin joint equipped mechanical stoker motor steam supply line.

4). The draw bar withdrawn right from under the buffer pad.  (Which operates with an Inter-cushion Buffer.)

5). Ascending Stoker Worm.  (Pic S03 below) – it just slips out the tunnel.

6). The flexible claw-coupling fitted exhaust pipe for the stoker motor.  (It discharges into the ash pan.)

7). The train brake vacuum pipe.

8). The RHS safety chain.

9). The right injector feed-water pipe.  (Feed from tender’s water tank)

10). The electrical connection to the tender lamps.  (Under the cab roof)

When both of the bogies have been overhauled and are back under the frame, the entire tender tank \ coal hopper is to be lifted off the chassis to repair and replace the decking as necessary.  The entire rolling chassis will be then stripped back, carefully inspected for cracks and rivet failures, repaired if necessary and then given a good thick coating of water proofing.  The tender tank underside will be stripped back and inspected for weak points and weeping type water leaks, and reinforced where necessary. 

We plan to have the steam crane properly re-certified and back into steam by then, and so we’ll have ‘Shosholoza’ back to full strength to help hoist the tender body around off and back on the frames again.

Essentially, Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’ is going to be treated to a full tender overhaul.  Following are some photos that show the existing condition.

Someone might pick up that this 12 wheel tender is technically incorrect for the SAR Class 15F type locomotive.  They would be correct too ... many of the Class 15F’s were retro-fitted with the longer Class 23 type ‘EW’ tenders to extend their operational range.  (Pic S07 below) The large Class 23’s, slightly bigger than the 15F’s, were all retired as a class in the early 70’s because of widespread metal fatigue in their 5 inch thick frames.  This was their heritage from being built with second grade German steel at the onset of WWII, while the best steel was reserved for the armed forces.  The SAR Class 15F’s were originally fitted with short 4-axle tenders (the JT type) to fit on turntables.  (15F No.2914 ‘Spikkels is still running with a ‘short’ JT tender.)

The original 4 axle JT type tender carries 14 tons of coal and 21 280 liters of water.  The longer (and visually much more appealing) EW type tender carries, by contrast, 18 tons of coal and 35 970 liters of water.  The longer tender is considered much more attractive as it lengthens the tractive set and visually balances out the engine.  A disadvantage is the center axle seriously restricts access to the bolster pivot clamps and the brake relay rods.  (Pic S08 below) These are usually serviced once a year and the bogies have to be dropped to do this.  These ones haven’t been taken off for a long, long time.  Incidentally, the 6 axle tenders for the Class 25 series, condensers, converted and conventionals, all share the same weak point.

SIA PROJECT : GMAM No.4079 ‘Lyndie Lou’ Stoker Motor Replacement :

It was high time to clean up the big dusty doll parked on road No.4 in the Workshop.  We had hoped to get the Sandstone Estate’s GMAM Garrett No.4079 roadworthy in the early months of this year, and were even talking about some sort of launch or unveiling on a summer time Magaliesburg run.  However, Dave Shepherd’s Class 15F No.3052 ‘Avril’ rolled on her then-bulls eye wheels into the limelight and kept us occupied for quite a few weekends.

But ‘Lyndie Lou’s’ time has finally come around – and she IS actually to be cleaned and polished this week!  Actually, the engine is quite clean in terms of oil and road dirt, and even has some new detailing paint – just the dust and cinders from the shed have collected a bit.  The repair work would involve rebuilding another axle to enable us to get the rebuilt Vesconite-equipped Bissel truck back under the engine where it belongs.  The overhauled Stoker Motor was also properly reinstalled.  It had been slinged into its recess a week ago, on the leading RHS corner of the rear bunker.  So it simply needed to be nudged into its final position and connected up.

Mike Thiel did the refit work, appropriately, being the fellow that rebuilt the contraption.  It took him the whole day – wasting time because of poor access and having to contort himself around and even behind the stoker in its recess.  He reminded me of a flea getting into a dog’s ear.  Because of the close confines and poor lighting, it was hard to take decent photos – but there’s enough for you to see the process.

The job started by removing the sling strap.  (Pic T01 above)  The stoker had been dropped squarely onto the mounting pads, but the foundation bolts had not yet been fitted.  It could be shifted slightly and lifted upwards to get the strap out.  But in Pic T01, you see how the hoisting strap managed to tangle up with the exhaust line. 

Michael’s strategy was to get the two largest pipes aligned, being the steam inlet and the exhaust, before snugging down the foundation bolts.  (Pic T02 above)  The small bore lubrication pipe could be bent to fit, and the drive shaft runs with universal joints anyway, and can naturally take a bit of misalignment.  Of the two large pipes, the exhaust pipe was the most rigid and would cause the most problems with leaks at the union, albeit with exhausted non-pressurized steam.

It took some close quarter grunting to rotate the stoker motor and shift it outward to line up the pipes.  The male threads received a seriously generous helping of graphite grease before the union was started and tightened up on the first few threads.  The next task involved rotating the badly misaligned steam intake pipe with the intake.  (Pic T03 above)  You can see that this intake is complete with its choke valve and bleed nuts.  All locomotive oil lines that fed into a pressurized steam space, typically the stoker motor, valve chests and the cylinders, are equipped with chokes (restrictors) to reduce the effective force of the pressurized steam blowing back up into the lubrication lines.  This stoker intake also has an intact bleed valve – a facility to physically open the line and see if oil is actually getting into the steam intake.  Whether on a tender locomotive or a Garratt, the Mechanical Stoker Motor is fed by a long and vulnerable oil line from across the yawning gulf of the tender drawbar, and ultimately from the Hydrostatic lubricator, or the eccentric-driven mechanical lubricator up front as the case may be.  The top nut on the brass fitting is to allow direct injection of oil.  A mechanically lubricated locomotive does not generate pressure in the oil lines when at stand still.  While that doesn’t hurt the pistons and the valves as they are naturally at stand still, the stoker may still be in use.

Anyway, this fitting would have been easy to rotate anticlockwise to line it up – but that might cause leaks as one would loosen the pipe threads.  With this in mind, Michael grunted it around clockwise to line it up, with a gwala bar inserted into the tee-piece.  Clockwise is tighter – hence the grunting and the gwala.  He managed to rotate the intake into line without stripping the threads or cracking a pipe (Pic T04 below).  The steam intake got the brushed-on graphite grease treatment on the threads, and just like the wider (low pressure) exhaust pipe, the union was run up on the first few threads.

The oil line received the same treatment (Pic T05 below) before the task of gently snugging up the foundation bolts to ensure the alignment stays intact.  Getting the bolts down evenly was the most contortionist of the jobs.  I was watching Michael from my vantage point from underneath the green critter in the next track – and sometimes you might just see one grimy arm and a pair of blue clad buttocks elevating like a noon cannon. 

The Universal joint looks like it hasn’t seen oil for several years – but the ‘spider’ and the universal joint yokes were still serviceable.  There was light surface rust but no real pitting.  Michael took the spider and polished each of the four ‘legs’ (Pic T06 above) right down to 1000 grit emery.  The compound yokes were externally brushed off and the bores cleaned out.  You can see the newly cleaned and lightly lubricated spider next to a roughly cleaned yoke plate in Pic T07 below.  This was dark and restrictive work (Pic T08)  The engine had to be turned to get the lower yoke plate horizontal to act as a shelf to hold the half assembled joint on the square-sectioned primary shaft. 

With the shaft tightened up, the foundations bolts creaked into place and the pipes lined up, it was time to do the finishing work of tightening up the steam intake and exhaust unions respectively.  They were easy to line up by hand as the well-greased threads had already been started before the stoker was bound-down.  The slogging spanner finished off the job – one hex at a time.  This stoker motor has been test run on compressed air and it was assessed to run powerfully and smoothly after a thorough strip n’ rebuild.  So the GMAM Garrett should be able to feed herself for years to come, and unlike certain rail operators, we will take care to keep the vulnerable universal joints lubricated!

PROJECT : The Chairman climbs in :

The ‘Cute Chairman’ Elize Lubbe came high-striding in between the biggest and the littlest green machines, apparently quite dissatisfied with the acetylene torch techniques of the crew.  She climbed right in to demonstrate just how to cut a slot in an axle bearing race.  The results were hilarious. 

As you can probably tell, these pictures were posed.  Elize is a good sport and wasn’t annoyed when we asked her to participate in the workshop.  She is an effective and tireless campaigner for our cause.  She is obviously distinctly out of place amongst the tools, big chunks of rolling iron and the grit, but is definitely in her element with the phone, fax, computer and the A4 paper.  (Those finger nails wouldn’t last very long for sure and they’d take forever to clean, but they WOULD: be useful as built-in gasket pickers.)  She isn’t dykish or mannish in her demenour, still maintaining her femininity in what is definitely a male dominated world.  She has earned maximum respect from each one of our regular members.  Without Elize representing us and sometimes quite literally striving for us, this Steam Locomotive Association would be going no-where fast. 

PROJECT : Club House :

The new Clubhouse (ex ablution block) has made great strides and is almost finished – Fred Sewell has worked his buns off on this project and the results are well worth it.  In the mean time, the existing clubhouse has had some work done in terms of clearing up and organizing – a project driven by none other than ‘The Cute Chairman’ herself.  The idea is to use