Southern Electric Group
4Cor unit 3142
Preservation Report 15

Preparing a Cor for Public Display

After the frantic efforts in the spring to move three coaches out to the Woodpax yard at Sheffield Park, only two coaches now remain at St Leonards. We are concentrating our efforts on bringing the motor coach 11201 up to a presentable standard ready to go on show at Horsted Keynes later this year. The other motor coach 11187 is waiting until after this phase when we will return to restoring it to full working order.

11201 has been left more or less untouched for the eight years or so that I have been on the preservation team at least, and its condition has deteriorated. The work we are undertaking has a rather different emphasis to what we have done on 11187, we are simply making it watertight, painting it, and clearing out the inside, a far cry from our efforts to almost rebuild '187. The work falls into three areas:

First make the roof watertight, then fill and paint the outside,finally clear and re-panel the inside.

I am pleased to announce that the publicity surrounding the proposal to put this coach on public display has resulted in the size of our team doubling. Julian Pope, Nathan Whittington, Jim Emmett, and Glen Woods having joined the original team of Graham there would be no chance at all of completing the work this year.

The roof of '201 still has its original canvas, plus another coating has also been applied on top of this by the SEG probably while at the Nene Valley. While this is generally sound there are areas where it has cracked, and along most of the edge above the cant rail it had split and peeled back. In addition there were a few bare areas where it has come away altogether.

It was decided to patch the cracked and peeling areas by "gluing" a thick cloth using roofseal over the affected areas, then painting more roofseal over the top of the patch. This method is used to repair flat roofs, and it was suggested originally by volunteers on the Isle of Wight railway who have a lot of coaches much older than ours which have to spend their lives outside. Along the edge care was taken to ensure the patch overlapped right onto the top of the cant rail to prevent water getting down behind this. In the areas where the canvas was missing roofing felt has been tacked down, with the edges again glued down. This same roofseal was then applied over the entire roof area, two coats being used as recommended. We have used grey rather than black as this will be nearer to the appearance of the coach when new. This phase of the work has now been completed, we are very hopeful that it will keep the rain out, but it should be relatively simple to carry out any repairs at a later date if necessary.

photograph by Glen Woods

Undoubtedly the largest part of the work is that to sand, fill and paint the body sides. The body work is in a similar state to that on 11187 when we started on that, panels are rusted right through in places especially around the joins near the windows and along the bottom edges of the body. On '187 we have taken drastic action, removing panels completely and either replacing with new or welding patches onto the old ones. We do not have time to do any such work on 11201, instead we are screwing any loose flapping edges down to the wooden frame and filling with car body filler, red oxide is then applied over the repair. The complete area is then rubbed down ready for repainting. At the time of writing this (mid June) one side has been filled and rubbed down and we are about half way along the other side.

The whole coach will be painted in buff undercoat which is the recommended base for the olive green top coat which we will apply in line with the Bluebell lines wishes.

There are a number of miscellaneous jobs associated with the body sides. the doors require particular attention, most of them tending to stick. One door (on the train end drivers side) was in a particularly bad state, we decided at first to take off the metal panel from the lower part of the door and replace this. This proved particularly difficult because the handle was jammed tight to the lock, and without taking off the handle it is impossible to remove the panel. This is a problem we have come up against on '187 but it still took a lot of time to remove it. Having done this it then became apparent that the wood was not in a good state either. Luckily we became aware that the Watercress line had a number (10 in fact) of spare doors of the correct vintage that they were prepared to sell, so the group bought these and we took the one which was the best fit as a replacement. As an aside, as many members will be aware, all components on a coach are marked with the coach number and this replacement door came from trailer third 10085 from unit 3131 whose motor coach 11179 is of course preserved at the NRM. Equally interesting was the discovery that some of the doors were from PAN coaches with air vents fitted above the drop lights. The new door still required a good deal of trimming to fit, but eventually it has ended up much better than the original.

We decided that in view of the short time scales we would not try to replace any more doors at present. The other three passenger doors all had defective drop lights (which stayed permanently dropped unless propped up). Fig 1. shows the construction of the bottom runner on the light, this is obviously a bad water trap and inevitably rusts away. We have replaced these with a simple U section which has the lug which connects to the scissor action support spring, welded to it. All the passenger doors are now in a working condition. The same cannot be said of the guards doors, the pair on the blind side were jammed tight but given that this is not the side to which people will have access at Horsted Keynes we decided that we would leave them jammed for now. Luckily those on the drivers side are in an adequate state.

Another area requiring attention is the saloon lights. We are lucky that only one of the main saloon lights is broken. A well aimed stone from a Hastings yobbo obviously found its way through a window in the depot which a colleague had obligingly broken earlier, and did its evil work.

The lights are held in to the aluminium frames by wooden frames bolted on the inside, when we removed this particular frame we found it to be rotten in one corner, this is currently under repair.

Some of the sliding top lights are also broken, luckily we have some complete spares, so these should not prove too problematic to repair.

This brings me to the last area of work, the inside. To date we have not done a great deal, the ceiling was in good condition and a large proportion of this has been repainted. In addition some of the internal framing below the windows has been replaced, it must be said that '201 is in a rather worse state than '187 in this respect. The frame work below the windows is rotten and a lot of it has been broken away already. Fig 2 shows the basic layout of the framework in one of the seating bays, we intend to repair two bays therefore four such areas must be brought up to standard. One side of the coach appears to be ok but the framework on the other side requires rebuilding completely. The uprights which hold the seat and armrest supports, as well as the armrest and seat supports themselves have rotted, these uprights must of course follow the contour of the body. Luckily the main body side supports are sound, these are probably teak, whereas the less important wood is an inferior variety. So far the framework on one of the bays has been repaired.

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