Southern Electric Group 4Cor unit 3142 Preservation Report 10

4 COR Preservation Report Autumn 2001

Painting the outside of the body of the power car 11187 has indeed taken up a lot of our time in the last few months. All the body panels and window frames have now been refitted and painted in red oxide. At first sight one could be forgiven for thinking that it was an LMS coach. This red oxide is good as a rust inhibitor but is not in itself waterproof, gloss paint is necessary to provide the true waterproof seal.

The group have bought some enamel paint which was specially made to represent the light green used in the early years after nationalisation, 1948 to 1958 (this being the colour which was most favoured by the preservation team). The colour was produced by copying a tin of model enamel paint, we now have a code number therefore for any further orders. This enamel will not cover directly over red oxide however, and so we are first covering this in a grey undercoat. The red oxide is given a light rub down with medium grade wet or dry paper, but even so we have found that one coat of grey will not cover sufficiently, and so a second rub down and coat of grey is required. So far we have almost completed one side in grey, it looks a bit like one of the Connex units before the final livery had been decided upon. The weather this autumn and the early part of winter has fortunately been much drier than last year and so this has not held us up to any great extent. It must be borne in mind that although we are indoors the roof at St Leonards is not 100% waterproof and it does not need too many drips to spoil a coat of paint. In fairness it must be said however that St Leonards Railway Engineering have had a good deal of work done recently to improve the roof.

With one side in grey we decided to have a trial with the new green enamel on a small section at the rear end of the coach. The cold weather is not ideal however, the paint does not flow as well, and although a very pleasing shiny surface was achieved it was not as smooth as we would like and so we will use the remainder of the winter to complete the grey and apply the top coat when the weather is warmer. Up until fairly recently the guards compartment has been used as a store for all sorts of bits and pieces tools etc. but we have now started to do some work on the inside, I have mentioned before the work inside the drivers cab. Therefore the guards area has been cleared, this looks much better and has also allowed work to start up on the bulkhead between the guards and drivers compartments. On the drivers side are the equipment boxes but the guards side is panelled at the top in sheet steel, I do not know why this is so as all the other bulkheads are wood. These steel sheets have now been removed for repainting. Immediately behind the drivers seat there is a small opening window like a serving hatch into the guards compartment and to the side of this are the batteries for emergency lighting. In amongst this, work is carrying on at a low level on the doors. There are as I have said before only two passenger doors on each side of the passenger compartment, one at each end with a transverse vestibule between them. Figure 1 shows a reminder of the layout of the motor car. It will be noted that all four passenger doors open the same way this means that three of them can open onto a rubber stop on the side of the coach, but the one at the train end on the blind side could swing right round, and without anything to catch it would soon break away. to prevent this some straps are placed between the door edge and the carriage interior, see Figure 2. Even so this is probably not as effective as a proper door stop, and when we came to look at this particular door there was definite evidence of damage. The frame had been broken before on the hinged edge near the top; this had been repaired but when we lifted the door down it was evident that it had broken again. It is probable with hindsight that it was the action of the strap pulling tight as the door swung open which caused the break. We considered splicing a new piece in, but there was no need once we realised that in our Aladdin’s cave (motor coach 11201) there were three or four spare doors. All of these spares are in fact first class, but the dimensions are exactly the same, someone suggested (rather impudently) that the Southern Railway might have allowed for possible extra girth with first class passengers.

One thing that quickly became apparent was that the hinges would not line up on the new door. The bottom two were therefore removed from the new door and marked and drilled when it was re hung. Although this door has almost certainly remained idle and under cover for many years since withdrawal (it was in fact still in blue livery) its condition was no better than the others on the coach. Most door panels rust worst of all around the handle, and this one was no exception, requiring a new patch to be welded in. The window mechanism also was not in any better shape than that at the other end which I described before (Live Rail 180). This time however the repair has ended up more like the original. The bottom edge of the glass has been set into a steel U section channel using silicon rubber. Aluminium runners were then fitted to the inside of the door and the steel bottom edge of the window slides inside these, this arrangement seems to work very well in fact. The scissor action spring support is the same as the earlier passenger door.

When it came to replace this door we again found a surprising amount had to be trimmed off before it would fit (were first class passengers broader after all?) An angle grinder which is normally used to grind off metal was found to be equally effective on wood, eventually of course we have ended up with a good fit, but surprisingly the profile of the door is not a perfect match to the profile of the coach. All these things must inevitably distort with age, the difference is not apparent from a distance but the door is definitely flatter than the coach, protruding slightly at top and bottom. As an aside Figure 3 shows the characteristic Maunsell coach profile compared to the more modern shape. We now have all the doors on this blind side refurbished the drivers (second man’s) door has not been removed, but the panel has been repaired some time ago, and a replacement window fitted, the original having a certain amount of rotten wood on the bottom edge.

Most members will be familiar with the locking mechanism on the windows on the passenger doors, a lever being moved to either the secure or free position. We have a large number of spare “Secure” and “Free” labels, but none of the those fitted in between them which state: “To lower window put handle in free position and pull down window”.

These labels are made of aluminium and have corroded quite badly over the years. The one at the rear (train) end was in need of attention and after cleaning as far as possible I re-touched it in with black paint using a cocktail stick. This was a pleasant job to take indoors on a winter’s evening, and all went well at first, until I managed to hook my feet around the cable going to the lamp I was using, and pulled the half full tin of black enamel onto the floor. This seemed at first like a total disaster, but after an hour or so of careful scrubbing I managed to get most of it out of the carpet. Luckily my wife was keen to have a new lounge carpet anyway, but needless to say any further such work will be undertaken out in the shed, once the new carpet arrives. The label did turn out reasonably well too. We have also been involved in a couple of other interesting indirect activities recently. The group have purchased a second hand compressor from the Bluebell line, this will be used mostly for powering a needle gun to clean the sole bars etc. previously we have had to borrow that belonging to St Leonards Railway Engineering. This device is on three wheels and had to be fork lifted into and out of a van to carry it to St Leonards. The problem was that with only 3 wheels it is not very stable and each time we went round a bend it toppled over. However we eventually managed to deliver it safely, and it is now being repainted.

Worse than this however has been the delivery of two bogies and 4 buffers from Swanage. As many of you will know Swanage was home for a number of years to a trailer car from the 6Pul trailer 11773 from unit 3018, this had however deteriorated drastically until eventually it was scrapped. The SEG had asked for the bogies which the Swanage railway kindly agreed to, these will be used in due course as accommodation bogies when overhauling those on 3142. Thus it was that one chilly January morning a low loader turned up at St Leonards with these two bogies aboard and the buffers on top. These were run off the low loader with the help of a fork lift truck but there then remained the task of manoeuvring them to their intended storage position on the seaward side of the depot. The bogies will run OK on concrete on their flanges (a pinch bar being used to lever the wheels round), but turning them is a different matter all together. It was necessary to navigate around a sharp corner on the end of the building with very little clearance at the other side. We could do this only by lifting the end of the bogie on a jack and then pushing it off side ways to move the bogie round by a few inches at a time. Well we managed one, but the other is still waiting, we are hoping that the fork lift truck may be able to help with this. These two bogies and four buffers are all that now remains of the pre-war Brighton line stock (apart from the Brighton Belle cars). In my last few articles I have stated that it is our intention to start soon on the roof. This has still not started because of our wish to complete the painting of the body firSt This was supposed to be a fairly quick exercise but in practice with all the coats of paint and rubbing down in between this has taken a lot of time, however we can now look forward to the stage when all of the outside of the coach will be complete.