Our Facilities.

How we started

Our locomotive left Barry in 1987 and was taken to the base of Humberside Locomotive Preservation Group at Dairycoates, Hull. There it was stripped down to component parts and repairs to some of those parts commenced whilst other new parts were started to be fabricated. Work was then put on hold and the locomotive was put up for sale. This was where we came in. A number of active volunteers from the Colne Valley Railway (CVR) formed a consortium to raise the funds to purchase 45163 for restoration back to full working order and eventual use at the CVR.

The purchase was completed at the end of 1991 and work parties started to travel regularly to Hull to recommence work on restoration. In 1993 the locomotive and all component parts were moved to the Colne Valley Railway at Castle Hedingham in Essex. Restoration work continued and quite good progress was made, however, our locomotive was now outside whereas it had been undercover at Hull. We soon realised that our project stood a much better chance of successful completion if we could provide full undercover engineering facilities. Something that the Colne Valley Railway did not have to offer from its own resources. The search for a suitable building located a disused steel frame structure in an old coalyard no more than a mile away from the railway. Following successful negotiations for its purchase, in February 1997, we dismantled it and transported it to the railway. The original building was only 60 feet long so we have constructed an additional steel bay to extend it to 75 feet in length x 40 feet wide. Construction was substantially completed in 2002 with an official opening by railway artist Malcolm Root on Saturday 27 April 2002.

                        

The Southeast elevation of the shed showing the cladding completed.             Malcolm Root cuts the ribbon to officially open our restoration shed.

Work on the locomotive did not stand still whilst the shed was being constructed. Most efforts were concentrated on the acquisition of missing parts. Either by locating original components or by sourcing castings ready to be machined to make the parts that we need.

 

The first machinery was installed in the shed even before all the walls were up. This facing lathe was put to use boring the wheels for our frame trolleys which were required to get the locomotive frames into the new shed. One of the finished trolleys can be seen behind Malcolm Root in the image above where he is cutting the ribbon.

Once the building was finished it was fitted out with power and air and a variety of equipment to hand at the time was installed including lathes, drills, milling machines, workbenches etc. We are always on the look out for additional equipment that will either update or enhance our capability and this webpage records changes or additional facilities as they are added.

 

We acquired a number of pieces of equipment from Lots Road Power Station, this radial drill came from their and was the first piece of equipment from Lots Road to be installed in our workshop. We previously had a radial drill but it was quite difficult to use and the capacity was not great. That was removed to make space for this much larger machine, it has already seen quite a bit of use.

 

This was the second machine from Lots Road to be installed. We recently had a contract job that required a greater lathe centre height than the 15" Cardiff that is our main workhorse so it suddenly became an urgen tjob to get this installed and serviced so we could use it. This posed a problem in that we did not have anything we could tak eout of the workshop to make the space so some very creative re-arranging of the workshop was required to make the space to fit it in. When we first built our workshop the space seemed very generous and more than we thought we would ever need. We now wish it was bigger!