Major work to put Scotsman back on the rails

. Rob Lytton, chief engineer at the National Railway Museum at York comments, “Since December 31st 2005, the locomotive has been out of service. We’ve been stripping it down since then and refurbishing parts as required. Whilst dismantling the engine, it was confirmed to us that the right hand side outside cylinder had a crack from end to end. We had a spare cylinder, but the large face, which bolts onto the main frame of the engine was pitted with rust, as it had been 40 years since the spare cylinder was removed from a locomotive. “So we looked for an engineering company who had the capability to precision machine the cylinder face. A minimum amount of metal was to be machined away, 2mm as it turned out, so that a standard size of steel shim could be manufactured to maintain the centre distance from the cylinder to the engine frame. Corus [Corus Process Engineering] at Workington had the necessary machining facilities to undertake the work and made life easier for us by ensuring that all we had to do was to get a standard size steel shim manufactured.” The eight plain bearing faces on the bogie at the front of the engine also had to be machined by CPE because they were out of alignment. CPE marketing manager David Scatchard said, “We were fortunate that we had just the machine to help with the project. The one we used was a planer that was large enough to take the whole frame and with a small enough universal milling head to get between the axle box faces. The cylinder block was machined on the same machine, but we were able to use a much larger cutter.” The National Railway Museum hopes to have the locomotive back on the rails in “Late 2007.”