Introduction:

October 2007 saw the Association members head north once again but this time only as far as the Midlands, Loughborough to be exact.

There were 2 venues which had been agreed at the Spring AGM - the John Taylor Bell Foundry and the Great Central Railway Museum - both of which were only a few minutes drive apart and therefore very accessible having arrived in Loughborough.

Several of the members who attended the visit had already visited the Great Central Railway on previous occasions but still felt that it was well worth visiting again because of the sheer number of exhibits available. It was for some members a first opportunity to not only enjoy looking at, but also to have a chance to get 'up close and personal' with all the enthusiastic refurbishment activities going on inside the engine sheds.  

Thankfully the weather in Loughborough was a lot better than we had experienced the previous year in Leeds. This made it considerably more pleasant as we walked around outside alongside the tracks and amongst the mighty steam locomotives of the Great Central Railway Museum.

If there was anything at all to criticise about the visit then it would have to be that there was simply not enough time to spend looking closely at all the remarkable engineering on display. At both the Bell Foundry and the Steam Railway. The whole day passed too rapidly and soon it was time for us all to make our way back down south with plenty to talk about on the way.

Don't forget, you can read an account of each visit by selecting the labelled buttons or clicking on the images at the top of this page.

The meeting point was set to be at the John Taylor Museum and members gathered under the museum sign ready for the guided tour to begin at 10.30. The tour was given personally by the museum curator, who demonstrated an amazing knowledge of the bellfounders' craft as he explained the intricacies of designing and creating the 'perfect' bell.

In the small, but comprehensive museum itself we were shown exhibits of different types of bell - cowbells, crotal (jingle) bells, handlebells and in the foundry itself, hemispherical bells and some tower bells dating back over several centuries. We were shown how the bellfounders were able to produce the beautiful sounds from what is ostensibly an open-ended drum made of metal: Bronze to be correct with a content of 23% tin and 77% copper.

We were informed that John Taylor Bellfounders has been in existence for over 200 years and whilst it started as a family business, it no longer enjoys that status but still carries the name. It is the largest bellfoundry in the world and one of only two in Britain. The other one is at Whitechapel, London.

Robert Taylor having served his time with Bellmaster Edward Arnold at Joseph Eayre's foundry took charge of the foundry in 1786. It was not until 1859 that the current bellfoundry was built on the site of a Cherry Orchard and has remained so despite being seriously damaged by fire in 1891. The last family member to be associated with the bellfoundry was Paul Taylor who died in 1981 and since that date the company has existed as a limited company with no family connections.

The material that any bell is made from determines the sound it produces and the eventual cost to the bell owner. Brass bells used in everyday situations such as in schools or by town cryers are less resonant - more of a 'clang' than a 'dong' or a 'ting' - but are much more durable when dropped.

Having said this, the expected life span of a large tower bell is claimed to be in the order of 1000 years! However, during that time it will obviously need maintenance and almost certainly re-tuning due to the damage caused by the constant striking of the iron clapper.

It came as no surprise to hear that the Great Paul in St. Paul's Cathedral was cast by John Taylor Bellfounders and weighs in at 16 tonnes making it the largest in the British Isles. They also produce hand bells of bronze but not brass.

Each step of the process was carefully explained to us and even though we had all had experienced the workings of a foundry during our time as apprentices, this all seemed to be on a much grander scale.

The process of creating a large bell follows certain necessary steps and starts with the decision to specify the bell's characteristics - tone and size. Below are the steps shown as a list and by clicking on each step you can download and view a photograph taken of the specific stage.

• Preparing the Clay/Sand & Manure
• Preparing the Mould
• Preparing the Core
• Preparing the Case
• Inscribing the Bell
• Casting the Bell (no image available)
• Mounting the Bell
• Tuning the Bell

The full process is much too extensive to write down here but if you are interested in learning more about the subject and need more information, then please visit the John Taylor Bellfoundry website.

And so the visit at the foundry ended and we moved on to the Great Central Railway station for a bite of lunch and then a guided tour of the railway...  

After enjoying an excellent buffet lunch in a renovated Buffet Car alongside the platform, we were met by our guide for the afternoon, Tim. As a member of the Great Central Railway himself for many years, he began by explaining how the major railway companies such as the Great Central Railway (GCR), the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) and the London, Midland & Scotland (LMS) railways had originally come into existence. He also explained how over the decades as a direct result of financial difficulties, partially brought on by World War II, successive Governments had failed to solve the problems of the many diverse railway companies and had eventually decided to nationalise them all into one big railway company - British Rail.

Having painted the background to the demise of the GCR he told us of how with private funding the steam enthusiasts were able to purchase the unique double-track railway section and extend it through Quorn to Rothley and on to its present destination at Leicester North. There are still plans afoot to extend it in the other direction but not at present. We left the comfort of the Buffet Car and walked along the platform but not before we managed the odd photograph beside the distinctive station sign with you-know-who in centre stage.  

At the end of the platform was a rare sight - an Observation Car which had originally been part of the Coronation Express and had now been modified with a sound system for use by tourists travelling around Scotland.

Across the tracks on the other side of the platfrom was a restored Pigeon Coach, the type used by racing pigeon fans for transporting their birds to some faraway part of the country and then releasing them to find their way home.

Making our way towards the engine sheds we caught sight of the newly restored and very splendid steam locomotive - #30777 - with a good head of steam on its first test run out from the engine sheds. It painted such a good picture that no visit would have been complete without a group photo with this classic engine as a backdrop.

Tim, our guide for the day, recounted countless tales from his experiences as a young boy seeing all these grand old steam locomotives actually working in their heyday and how he had been lucky enough to travel on trains pulled by them. When you see these large and quite splendid pieces of engineering up close, you just have to marvel at the ingenuity and sheer design that went into making them so famous. Yes, coal and steam in themselves don't have a very attractive feel to them but when you put them together to produce the sort of controlled power of these engines then you have to express a certain level of wonderment.

So much to look at and still we hadn't reached the engine sheds where all the engineering work restoring these leviathans was being done. What's this? Another working locomotive complete with driver and fireman. "It's a Class 8F locomotive" says Tim. Fascinating collections of cranks and valves draws the attention of the non-railway engineer.

We stopped for a brief chat with the engine driver who surprised us by saying that he was a sprightly 75 years old. He had been apprenticed as a railway engineeer and spent his whole life on the railways and still enjoyed driving these very large locomotives. I think he could honestly be described as a man with a fulfilled passion for steam. He explained how the braking system worked - none of the small-bore hydraulic pipes for him, rather a sizeable cylinder powered by 250psi of steam operating a series of rods and bell cranks and eventually applying the brake shoes to the driving wheels. "And if the brakes fail?", we asked with temerity: "No problem for the experienced driver" he said, "I can still stop it using just the steam". There was an audible sigh of relief from the assembled group.

We strolled on a bit further towards the ultimate destination, the engine sheds, but stopped for a brief while as Tim explained the renovation work being done on a nearby engine boiler. It was hard to imagine how totally inelegant but functional the various components of a steam loco look when not assembled into a sleek, fairinged, smartly painted monarch-of-the-rails.

Finally we reached the Engine Sheds and you could smell the history from the doorway...

Inside we saw what to the untrained eye might look like a steam locos graveyard and yet in reality it was a place where new life is breathed into them by skilled hands and countless hours of devotion. Starting at one corner we could see the bare-boned chassis which one couldn't help but feel that perhaps they had stripped it down just a little too far and that no-one would ever be able to rebuild it. Still feeling more than a bit over-awed by the sheer scale of things we passed work benches with spanners to fit nuts which make the proverbial Scammel wheel nuts look like Meccano sizes: This is heavy engineering.

Driving wheels taller than ourselves stood waiting to be connected by con-rods, and newly relined cylinders waited for an engineer's hands to fit the nearby piston.

Some of the machine tools used by the steam engineers were definitely on a much larger scale than anything I had experience of and seemed to cut metal with consumate ease. Swarf bins full of steel turnings so thick that you could measure them not in thousandths of an inch but in millimetres! Our tour took us around the shed in an anti-clockwise direction and it became obvious that we were progressing in the same direction as the work does because we could now see the locomotives start to appear more assembled and look more and more like the famous machines that they once were.

'Boscastle' - now there's a well-known name. Hard to imagine, without the help of a photograph, how she will look clad in a fine new cloak of freshly painted metal. As each engine nears completion and passes many checks and tests along the way, it moves closer to the front of the shed until finally it is ready to be handed to a driver and shown off proudly to a waiting crowd of enthusiasts and excited passengers.    

And so after several hours of living and breathing steam engineering, with our heads full of whistle noises and the sound of hissing steam from boilers bursting with energy and no trains to pull, we thanked our guide Tim and bade farewell to the Great Central Railway and Loughborough and headed back home.

The foundry visit immediately brought back the wonderful memories of the workshop sounds and smells of the machine shops at Enfield,and particularly the actual foundry floor at Enfield Foundry at Waltham Cross which many of us experienced during one of our 6 month spells.

Martin Stratford and John Healey were chastised for breaking away from the main party to look round the machine shop, but were rewarded with the opportunity to photograph some Dean Smith and Grace lathes!

The foundry itself took me back nearly 50 years when seeing that virtually nothing has changed when it comes to moulding-in sand, on the floor, and the melting of metal in Wild Barfield furnaces.

Interesting to see a whole heap of brake discs being melted down to cast the bell mountings and yokes - no wonder there's a shortage of discs for my S-type Jaguar! Great stuff,long may the Company survive.

The Great Central Railway also took me back to my early Sulzer years when workshops like those at Loughborough, albeit somewhat cleaner and more modern, were visited on a weekly basis to review the production, installation, commissioning and repair of the 1550 diesel engines we built for BR's modernisation programme.

Naturally, we were not very popular with the steam enthusiasts at that time (or since in many cases), because we were replacing some 6000 steam locomotives falling apart at the rivets! There were a handful of diesel locos at Loughborough - 3 of which were Sulzer and one Class 47 was of particular interest because back in the 70's it was one of four that had experimental engines from our latest range. Sadly,through no fault of our own, all four failed in a big way and were re-engined.

I have since been in contact with the GCR man who looks after the diesels giving him the background to these series of failures. I have also put him in touch with an ex-colleague who was my service engineer for this class of locomotive and can still supply certain spare parts.

All in all, it was a great day out and thanks are due to the organisers, especially Barrie Mitchell.

Best Regards to everyone,
Chris Brooks 1957-1962 (50 years ago)!!