Burnley and Pendle Miniature Railway,

Burnley, Lancashire UK.

Hello and this is our September newsletter, September marks the end of our Summer running season and as usual our last weekends running is dedicated to a local small charity that we donate all our farebox over the weekend to. This year as last year our chosen charity was the Hub in Padiham who once again were delighted. We do include in the donation a contribution from ourselves which makes the total up into a sizeable figure.

We are now in the period of the year when we can carry out maintenance on the railway which we have been unable to dedicate sufficient time to during the summer. This year we have several largish projects which we intend to carry out but I will record these as we go along.

Two false starts but on the 3rd attempt we were successful in completing the screeding of our turntable apron, The previous 2 attempts were foiled by poor weather, but we got there in the end. The concrete here had been breaking up for several years and needed re-doing badly. It was subsequently painted with grey stone paint. The centre circle has also been cleaned and painted in the same paint. Weed removal; and re-ballasting has also contributed to making the area look much better. It remains to clean and prepare the steel parts of the turntable, and these will be painted in green.

Much work has gone into cutting the edges back of the original loop line from the station and an area which had had the corner dug out for some reason has been edged with steel plate and backfilled with earth to comply with the rest of the curvature. On the subject of grass cutting back, John spends all his time at the Railway cutting the track-base edges back around the mainline. With 2 kms. to cover he has an impossible job but sticks at it and does what he can.

The low level shed no.7 has been presenting issues with a lack of air circulation inside and 6   4″ holes have been cut in, 3 on each side to hopefully ease the problem. Too early to say if this is working yet.

One problem we have dealt with was with the electric Railcar which has been parked in the shed all summer with a failed motor bogie.  This has still to be sorted but we decided to at least get the unit operational. It has 3 cars with a total of 6 driving motors so we decided to fit a plain bogie to replace the missing motor bogie, It still has 5 motors so we tried it and it works just fine so that issue has been temporarily sorted. Brian who built the unit wants to fit bigger motors and stronger drive chains to it, but it will suffice as it is now with 5 driving motors.

On the track front, we are now able to carry out track maintenance without being bothered by those pesky trains and we have started on doing the maintenance in a more orderly section by section basis. The track is basically in good order but there are one or two improvements we want to do which will involve taking out full track panels and refurbishing the base underneath.

We are also using plastic sleepers exclusively now, more expensive but the return should come in the longevity. The immediate effect is that they prove much cleaner to fit, the fitting technique differs slightly but we are well happy with them so far.

Soon we will be buried under a deluge of leaves as the trees shed their now unwanted summer load. This is where our portable blower comes into its own though we do often feel like King Canute TBH.