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Jonathan was in again on Saturday doing some more refurbishment work on Station lamp heads and carriage plugs.

Sunday saw Jonathan, John, Clive and myself in along with Simon, the first job Jonathan and I did was to check out the fire alarm call points as usual in The Trackside and BBS, all was OK and the findings were recorded.

Simon had asked us all to help out rewiring the ETH. (Electrical Train Heating) on a Santa carriage, all of the rubber insulated wiring is perished and requires replacing.
The carriage & wagon staff last week had lifted the carriage off it's bogies to give us access to the underneath. This is quite a big job and today we managed to remove all the covers protecting the passengers from touching the heaters under the seats and clear out years of debris from under the seats.
All the ETH wiring is in steel conduit inside and underneath the carriage, all the bend covers have to be removed from the conduit to enable us to remove the old wiring and to then pull in the new plastic heat resistant cabling.

lunch was then back in our workshop, after a lot of frustration with trying to fish through new cables, some of the steel conduit underneath the carriage seems to be blocked!!!!

Back to the carriage for some more punishment, this time armed with some more PPE i.e. dust masks as working inside the carriage was very hot, sticky and dusty.
Jonathan and myself were working inside the carriage whilst Simon, John and Clive were pulling in new cable on the other side of the carriage, this conduit run appears so far to be free of obstructions.
The heaters are wired up in series, in sets of fours?

C & W require the carriage to be back in their hands so we will come in this coming Tuesday to help out Simon, we think it will take some time to finish off this job, at least another two or three weeks!

At the end of the day we looked and felt like we had spent the day working down the pit, all black and sweaty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Back to the workshop for a brew and a good wash.

Alan

Would it not have been simpler to provide an entirely new route / run for the replacement wiring thus saving the effort of removing the old stuff?

XTMike wrote:Alan

Would it not have been simpler to provide an entirely new route / run for the replacement wiring thus saving the effort of removing the old stuff?

It is all to do with the ETH heating which is high voltage, so the wiring has to be protected in conduit.
It is just hard working underneath the carriage, most of the conduit runs have only two wires in them, so we will have to persevere.
We have found one blockage at present, let's hope it is the only one, if more are found we will get the angle grinders out to fix the problem one way or another.
Onwards and upwards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What are they blocked with?

Probably teaching you to suck eggs but when I used to do such things for a living we would have fittings (made up) to connect the conduit to a air source and even if we had pulled out all the old cable we would give it a good blast to clear the debris. You just have to be careful not to go too mad and blow the conduit which happened once or twice with plastic!

You could then tie a bit of plastic bag to a length of light nylon string to use a blower tool to blast this through the tube before tieing the end to the cable and drawing that through.

Of course that depends on having a good source of air around and we often had trailer/van mounted compressors knocking about!

We presume the conduit and the cables inside are rusted in one particular spot, like I said we will probably angle grind it to see what is causing the blockage!
It will get sorted one way or another.