It's been another busy month or two at the ELR for D8233. The 4 th and final axle has now been on the lathe, sporting re=profiled tyres and polished plain bearing journals. Steve Thomas has been around the gearwheel with scotchbrite and elbow grease and it's pretty much done. All that's left to do with this axle is to put on the new roller bearing, the old one failed its exam last year.

The control frame has also seen plenty of volunteer's hours, with more relay overhauls. Some of the relays, once stripped have found to be wanting new parts, such as de-laminated mica tube. We have reached out to a firm who supplies modern mica tube and they have offered us the tube for free. A massive thank you to Langtec Ltd, of Accrington for the donation. We will be sharing the progress of these relays in the coming months. Rob has returned to hands on volunteering after his hiatus and immediately set about making the support rails for the next batch of relays. These are the exhauster and exhauster speed-up relays that will live at the bottom of the middle row. These bars have been painted in grey anti-track varnish and are ready to be mounted to the frame.

It has been decided between the volunteers that we needed some outside shelter for the winter months so we can work on some large items. We had the portable garage frame (used last on the bogie frames) and relocated it to our coach workshop. Covered now in old tarpaulins to keep the rain off and fitted some lighting in there too. We will be restoring the other battery box and fuel tank in here, but first up are the CoBo boiler section roof panels (pictured)

We also have facebook pages too, where we update regular progress - www.facebook.com/d8233

If you are interested in helping out please contact Rob Mason