Another busy weekend at Apedale. A major shunt on Sunday was needed to extract the Howard petrol loco; this left the yard looking as though a diesel gala was in progress. The Diesel Gala isn’t until 7 & 8 October, and hopefully will be rather better attended. The Howard needed to go onto the inspection pit for attention to its sanding gear. Meanwhile, in the shed, the Ffestiniog Coach has gained its first working light fitting (the previous lights were recovered by the FR for their own vehicles). We are using 12v LED fittings, which will run off an on-board battery. As you will note, electrical lighting caued some wonderment to one of our members. He comes from Manchester, so not too surprising. Very much a prototype fit, we will now proceed to fit all six such lights. As part of the testing/development phase, a non-battery 12v supply was needed, so hence the writer’s ancient train set controller was extracted from the loft and pressed back into use. This controller is, in fact, older than the coach itself (or the coach body at least – the underframe dates back to 1926).
