Preservation Report Winter 2008 - 2009

from Richard Lakin

The spring of 2008 found us with the two passenger saloons on motor coach 11187 at Acton refitted. We had planned that this would be the first summer that we would work on the outside of the coach, the previous summer having been taken up with repairs and repainting of coach 11201 at Horsted Keynes.

The tower, whose acquisition I had mentioned in my last report, was to play an important part in this.

When we left St Leonards about 3 years ago we had recovered the roof with new canvas but we had only made a start on fitting the cant rails, these are hardwood strips about 2" wide which overlap the join between the canvas and the steel panels on the side. I described the fitting of the first of these in my report in LR 208 in February 2006. These strips are about 15 feet long and so there are four needed each side, at the time of leaving St. Leonards we had only fitted two on the front of the driver's side, 6 more still remained to be fitted therefore. The front of the coach also has edging strips overlapping the join with the roof, and these of course are curved. The most awkward shaped pieces, as you can probably imagine, are on the rounded front corner, these are made of lead to enable them to curve in two directions at once. The front was in fact complete when we left St. Leonards apart from the blind (head code) side lead corner piece. During this summer we have managed to fit this remaining corner piece, and two long strips along the front end of the blind side. It is actually a very time consuming job, each long piece of cant rail has two rows of screws, one screwing into the roof boards and the other through the steel side panel into the wooden framework, about 60 screws are required per piece. The screws used are stainless steel, and a thick layer of mastic is applied under the cant rail, we consider ourselves to be doing well if two of us can fit one of these pieces in a day. Before leaving the subject of cant rails and roof edging, there are similar edging pieces required on the rear end of the coach. Three hardwood pieces are required similar to the front end, but there is no rounded corner to worry about. On the front end the lead corner piece makes a smooth transition from front to side, but at the back end there is a sharp corner with the side cant rails overlapping the moulding on the end. We have therefore also fitted these 3 end pieces during the summer, in preparation for the remaining cant rails which will now have to wait until next year. Figure 1 shows how all the cant rail strips fit together.

As an aside you may wonder where all these replacement pieces have come from, we are in fact very well stocked with spares like this. These wooden sections were made up by Frank George when he was active in preservation, well before my time on the Cor, i.e. before the mid 1990's.

Now that the interior was in a good state we decided we would try to open the coach to the general public at the Acton depot open weekend in November, we approached the museum authorities who were agreeable, and they even gave us some steps to enable visitors to access it. These steps are designed for indoor use, made from MDF which is a thicker version of hardboard, which used to be known by the more prosaic title "compressed cardboard" in fact they even used it to make carriage sides up until about 1900, well before my time. We then made some hand rails which bolt to the sides of these steps for greater safety.

Before we could open the coach however it was necessary to remove most of the surplus stores from inside and take these to the East Kent Railway to go inside our other coaches which are stored there. We had hoped to be able to take the surplus to our other store at the Woodpax yard at Sheffield Park, but the owners of this site are going to move our existing stores to a new location on the same site, and there is no room for any more until this is complete. The main point of moving the stores out was to enable the SEG sales stand to be set up inside the Guard's compartment. Ashley Saunders, our sales director helped Bob Burrows and me with the move, and we were very glad of the extra help, we started out from near Brighton with the van at about 0800, drove to Acton , loaded up the stores, and then off to Shepherdswell arriving about 3 o' clock. It then took another 3 hours or so until it was nearly dark, to transfer all of the stuff into the guard's compartment of 11161, our third motor coach which is covered up with tarpaulins there. It ended up about a 15 hour day for me!

Finally before the open weekend, we needed to repaint the front end of the coach. This had been a bit of a patchwork, we had some years ago painted it all yellow, believing that this would be necessary to run on the main line, however since then we had to replace one of the corner panels, and this was still partly in red oxide when we moved to Acton, the other corner panel was also partly repainted in green. The simplest solution was to paint the reminder of the front in green and leave only the small yellow warning panel on the lower half of the gangway. To my mind this was the livery which best suited the Cors. My wife assisted me with this repainting, she is very understanding of our eccentric hobby, and did a very good job too. I am still doing odd cleaning jobs around the house to repay the debt, and of course build up credit for the next time I need help!

We moved the few remaining stores in the coach to the end vestibule, and this part which is still in need of refitting was closed off, by means of the sliding door which separates it from the small passenger saloon. One problem with doing this was that inside this vestibule is our tool box, and when we slid the door closed the tool box lid (which had been leaning against it) fell back and so we could not then open the door again! We did get it open eventually after the open weekend by lifting the tarpaulin clear and getting in through the outside door. As a final touch we fitted antimacassars to the seat backs in the coaches, this is not of course strictly correct for second (third) class, but did produce a quite pleasing effect. All that remained to do then was slide the tarpaulins right back to the rear end of the coach. We managed to push these back to uncover even the windows in the rearmost seating bay. We are hoping that there should be some photographs in this issue to show how the coach looked on the day.

The open weekend was a big success for the coach and the group as a whole. The sales stand which was set up in the guard's compartment did a very good trade and hundreds of visitors came in to look around, in spite of the horrible weather (it rained solidly on the Saturday). We hope from now on to open the coach to the public on each of the depot's open weekends. This coach 11187 is the only one of our five coaches which is not owned by the group, but is on long term loan. It is sad to report that the owner Bryan Juniper died just a few days before the coach was opened to the public for the first time in about 25 years.

Turning now to our other coach which is open to the public, i.e.11201 at Horsted Keynes on the Bluebell line. This has also continued to attract visitors, and we have not needed to do any significant maintenance on this during the year having of course repainted the body and roof during the previous summer, however on a routine visit in September we discovered that some paint on the front of the gangway had started to flake and this was re touched.

The two trailer coaches and the remaining motor coach remain at Shepherds Well, protected from the weather by substantial tarpaulins, but these have no immediate plans for restoration.

To summarise we have continued to make good progress on motor coach 11187 at Acton , and it has now joined 11201, which is on display at Horsted Keynes, back in the public domain. In addition to those people I have mentioned above, the group would like to thank, Phil Barnett, and Simon Pitt who have given valuable support to Bob Burrows and myself within the period of this report. Dick Coombes, for so long a stalwart, has told us that now he is in his eighties he is forced to accept that he cannot continue to help, although he still plans to visit us occasionally, he will be very welcome. He has given the group excellent service and we would like to thank him most sincerely for helping to keep the Cor alive.

On a more encouraging note, Graham Cornell who had to drop out 3 years or more ago after health problems has now recovered sufficient health and enthusiasm to help once more, so all in all we are currently doing reasonably well for volunteers, but of course like Oliver Twist we would always like more. There is a lower limit for volunteer numbers, below which we cannot continue, and once this is reached there is the fear that we could never restart.

During the recent review of preservation, the committee have agreed a plan as follows:

Over the next 18 months to two years, we will continue to put the coach at Acton back into a complete state, e.g. the driver's cab is in a poor state with a lot of rotten panels to be replaced, also the rear end vestibule needs re-panelling. On the outside the rear end junction boxes need to be refurbished and refitted, and the rear end gangway bellows have to be replaced. We will complete this before trying to do anything more ambitious to the electrical system or making any further improvements to the passenger saloons.

During this time we must make every effort to establish what the long term future for this coach and the Cor in general is to be, this must mean trying to find a user. The work we undertake, beyond the point of putting the coach into a complete state, must be directed towards whatever requirement a future user may have.

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