Preservation Report Summer 2007

from Richard Lakin

All of us involved in preservation have received quite a boost since the last report by the quite spectacular progress we have made on the interior of motor coach 11187 at Acton. During the last few months, we have come very close to completely refitting the large saloon, including recovering the floor. Readers will have seen pictures of this saloon in the previous Live Rail, and this one, I think you will agree we are entitled to feel very proud of our efforts.

The large saloon is the one towards the front "driving" end of the coach, the coach being semi-open. It is the larger of the two saloons because it has 28 seats, 3 bays of 2 + 2 seating, plus the coupe which is a half bay of two seats each side at the front end. The smaller saloon (yet to be restored) has only 3 bays and no coupe; which gives a total of 52 seats for the whole coach.

This then is the current status at Acton . For those with a technical turn of mind I will now go into a bit more detail on how all this work has been done. In my last report we had reached the point where the upper panelling was in place on one side and the framework was being replaced on the other. Once the framework was completely refitted, the job of completing the panelling could be started.

Fig 1 shows the layout of a typical seating bay. The thick (9mm) upper panels and the strip under the window both have slots on the reverse side which allows the thinner (4mm) lower panels to slide in underneath, this is shown in the exploded section above. These slots were probably cut by a machine originally but we have found it quite simple to clamp a steel bar about 10mm from the edge, and score the panel with a knife. The unwanted wood can then be chiselled away with the steel bar still in place; great precision is not a requirement for this job as it is not seen. We found it easier to fit the top panels first, then loosen off the screws at the lower edge and slide the lower panels into position.

The lower panels are covered in brown Rexene (American cloth) which is basically cloth covered with plastic giving a leather like appearance, this is glued to the panel by PVA glue. The lowest part of the panel is just painted, again in brown but a different shade - Rexene will not stand up to too much scuffing by passenger's feet.

When all of this panelling was complete the saloon was completely cleared and the floor was thoroughly cleaned, ready for the next job which was laying new floor covering.

We had given quite a lot of thought to how we would cover the floor. The original coach would have had lino, but we are not sure of the colour; and to be honest I doubt there are many people now who could remember what was fitted in 1938. The only clue we had was from the Railway Gazette of 1938 in the article describing the Portsmouth electrification. This describes the lino fitted to the new stock as a granite pattern. We decided that the only sensible way to do the job now was to use modern vinyl, all of these modern vinyls have patterns, unfortunately many being tile or wood effect. However, we had a good look around; even taking photos in shops and e mailing the pictures to each other. I must say, you do get a few funny looks when taking pictures of vinyl in a shop, but eventually we decided to spend a day looking and just pick the best we could. We were in fact quite pleased with our final choice, a grey / black stone like effect (it could be taken for granite or possibly marble), you can judge the effect of course from the photos.

Choosing the vinyl it turned out was the easy bit, we then had to get it up to Acton . The roll of vinyl was 3 m wide to cover the 2.4 m width of the coach. We tried to load it in my daughter's estate car, but even this was not long enough. We had no choice but to spread the whole roll out on Bob Burrows's front lawn and cut about ½ m off. The journey was then uneventful, but cutting to the exact width had to be done on the concrete outside in the yard at Acton , by this time the wind had got up and we had quite a job one of us holding it down while the other cut it.

The floor of the coach seemed to be covered by what looked rather like bitumen, and the staff in the shop had advised us that bitumen can bleed through and discolour vinyl so we coated the floor in PVA before laying the vinyl. Laying it was in fact quite straightforward, slots had to be cut out to go over the radiators still on the floor, and the runner for the sliding door had to be lifted to cover the join at the vestibule end. Referring back to Fig. 1 you will see that there is an approximately 45 ° skirting board which fits over the conduits that carry the heating cables along the sides, this is screwed in place and covers the edge of the vinyl and holds it in place very well. The original skirting had all rotted away and so we have had to re make new sections using a thin plank of wood and pieces of triangular section beading at each edge (a technique we had used before when repairing coach 201 now at Horsted Keynes).

It took 3 of us only one day to completely fit the vinyl in place having been joined by a new member Richard Winton.

The final job to complete the saloon was then just a matter of refitting the seats and luggage racks. I will go into more detail on how this was done in a later report when we have repeated the process in the small saloon, the two being identical in this respect. The saloon is now all but complete; we just need two more seat backs at one end, these must be brought up from our store at the Woodpax yard.

By the end of April we felt we had done as much as we reasonably could on the inside of '87 and turned our attention to some outside work. Our original intention had been to work on refitting the cant rail and external junction boxes on '87 but we realised that '201 on display at Horsted Keynes had the greater need. The heavy rains during the winter had found a good number of weak points in the defences and the whole coach had started to look just a bit below the standard we would like to display.

The roof on '201 is of course canvas over tongue and groove planking, I have described before how we have patched this with strips of canvas glued down with Roofseal. The patches have worked very well, and are still all securely in place, however new cracks do still appear in the canvas at regular intervals. We took time off from Acton in February to do some repairs to the roof but as luck would have it the rain started again just as we were finishing off, and a lot of the Roofseal ended up as grey streaks down the side of the coach., fortunately the canvas patches remained in place and we recoated the area again on a later visit.

Another problem is the cant rail strip at the edges of the roof; the rain runs off directly into these and trends to soak in; the net result is that the wood gets thoroughly wet. Some of this water undoubtedly runs down behind the side panels inside the coach, also the paint on these rails inevitably peels off, this flaking paint is probably the feature which has let the appearance of the coach down the most.

It is clear that the only long term solution is to completely recover the roof but it will be a few years before we can do this. We decided therefore that the best way to tackle the cant rails was to use the same technique as on the roof, i.e. to cover the complete rail in canvas glued down with paint. We have started peeling back the lower edges of the roof canvas and gluing canvas strips overlapping the cant rail, and slipping the top end underneath the roof canvas. There is every reason to hope that this will produce a seal over the wood which will remain waterproof and not peel.

As I mentioned earlier, the weather is always a problem with outdoor work like this on the coach. One week we were lucky to get away with it; we had applied some of this canvas over the cant rail and just after we left there was a downpour. I spent the rest of the week worrying that when we returned we would find just a few rags dangling down the sides, however on our next visit all was well. After that we pinned a strip of plastic sheet over the top to protect our work. One feature of the work was that the paint we used to glue down the canvas was yellow, and several people asked if that meant that the coach was now first class!

In addition to the roof, we will also need to fill and repaint patches on the sides where rust is coming through and finally re varnish the complete coach.

The inside of the coach has fared rather better but damp has got into the side panels in the large saloon. The lower ones you may remember were coated with wallpaper and painted to give the effect of Rexene, the mistake with this however was to use ordinary wallpaper paste, and so the edges of some of the panels had peeled. We have now re fixed these with waterproof PVA which should stay in place much better.

We are in fact still improving the inside of the coach, Simon Jeffs has taken some time off from his editorial duties to repaint the inside of the drivers cab. This was an area which we never had time to tackle before putting the coach on display; and of course it is a big attraction to visitors (old and young) to be able to sit in the driver's seat.

In my last article I outlined a plan where we would complete the large saloon on '87 this last winter and then refit the external components this summer. The first part of this we have achieved, but the extra work on '201 at Horsted Keynes will prevent any progress on the outside of '87. The next phase at Acton will be to tackle the small saloon this coming winter, we are in quite good shape for this because we have most of the framework in place, this was done some time ago, also most of the internal panels are now ready and waiting to go in. I will tell you how we get on both at Acton and Horsted Keynes in February.

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