35011 General Steam Navigation

It's been black for a few years now.......;-)

 

http://35011gsn.weebly.com/news/happy-71st-birthday

 

The amazing @cornishinc has created a new logo for our team. I am sure you'll agree it's brilliant

 

@35011GSN's Tweet: https://twitter.com/35011GSN/status/684470562702364673?s=09

 

January Update
1/18/2016



We are happy to confirm that the 35011 General Steam Navigation team will be hosting its first society stand at the Mid Hants Railway 'Watercress Line' Spring Steam Gala between the 12th and 14th February 2016. With several members of the team being involved with the MHR and the galas Southern theme it seems highly appropriate that our first stand would be hosted there. The team will be based the Boilershop viewing area at Ropley Station for all 3 days and will give you the chance to talk to our members about the project, volunteering opportunities and answer any questions you might have. At the gala we will be launching the 35011 General Steam Navigation membership club on the Friday so people attending the gala will have the chance to be some of the first people to join the membership Club. The 35011 General Steam Navigation membership group costs £10 for the year with members being kept up to date with the latest goings on with the locomotive, receive a magazine 3 times a year with progress reports on GSN and articles about Merchant Navy’s and the light pacific’s, access to the locomotive when possible and the ability to get involved with the trust. During the gala we will also have General Steam Navigation mugs available featuring our new logo which will be available for £6 each or in a bundle with a year’s membership for £15. We only have produced a small number of mugs so grab them whilst you can.



Towards the end of last year we asked our supporters across various social media platforms for ideas for the name of the member’s magazine and we received lots of great suggestions. The 30 names were then shortlisted down to 5 which were put to public vote and the overriding winner was "The Packet". Ian Ferguson who suggested the name will receive one our brand new mugs as a prize and a big thank you goes out to everyone suggested names and voted.


Easyfundraising is a great way to raise money for railway projects like us and we have recently joined the site. All you need to do is click on the link below and sign up. What this does is provides the project with cash donations every time you shop online. So next time you are buying train tickets or your weekly shop or pretty much anything else you can buy online go to the link below find the retailer you wish to use be it Amazon, The Trainline or many others and purchase your goods as you would do normally. It doesn't cost you anymore but we benefit from it. This is great and free way of supporting 35011. Above you can find a great video which explains how it all works and you join our EasyFundraising cause by clicking here. You can even earn free donations for us by signing up to free trials and services that don't cost a penny! You can find these on our free donations page. An example is if you sign up for Asda mobile sim card (no contract connected) they will donate 50p to GSN. Signing up with our cause will be gratefully appreciated by us no matter how small you think your donations might be.


Finally Stephen Bedser who designed our great new logo has been shortlisted by Healeys Cyder for their Artist competition. We would very much like you to support Stephen in this competition, but as with any such competition, it is your choice but it would be great to see a heritage painter win over the more traditional sea paintings. You can vote by clicking here.

Thank you for your support and hope to see lots of you soon at the Mid Hants Spring Steam Gala

 

A great first step, i hope you are so successful that you have order a second batch of mugs have you spoken to the 35006 group, because when she is relaunched that should also get you some publicity if you can get a stall there also, and who knows, if you get offf to a good start, maybe you will start to be believed and i look foreward to the day when one day 35011 ,in original condition is the star of a future Southern Gala especially if its alongside 35005 and 35006 .
One tech question, you have the plain wheel set from 34046, will you be able to press the wheel sets off that axle and re use them or will the replacement crank axle include the wheel sets ?

 

We hope to press the wheel pans off of the flawed axle from 34046 and have a new crank axle and crankpins made and pressed on to the wheel pans.
But First we have to find a new home for GSN.

 

A visit to the GWSR when 35006 is ready would be a good idea for publicity, there's bound to be plenty of people of the right sort of persuasion. I reckon we need a 12 coach train for P&O on her first public runs - with a couple of slight tweaks to our standard timetables it should fit fine; CRC and Toddington loops are both long enough for the run round and as long as the other train arrives in Winchcombe first it'll all be fine (I'm told this is technically feasible from a signalling point of view there).

 

A visit to the GWSR is on the cards for most people this year We all want to see that beast in action

 

I think its very good, and suspect that it is quite accurate to the casing variation carried by 35011, and also right down to the fact that the crosshead has come away and the connecting rod is about to fall onto the rail....

 

And is it thr right shade of green..... lol

 

The handy thing is that the unrebuilt Bulleids didn't need the balance weights required in traditional valve gear operation, so alterations to the wheel centres would be minimal, and it saves the cost of a new casting. What I've always wanted to know is whether new centre driving wheels were cast with provision for a balance weight during the rebuiding process, or whether a steel sheet was welded over the original centre drivers and the resulting 'pockets' created in the BFB wheels filled with some sort of ballast material (lead or otherwise)?

Musings aside, this potential saving will be more than offest by the need for a new middle cylinder block and crank axle- presumably they'd be fabricated? Beyond that, and barring nasty surprises with the boiler, there's little that can't be achieved provided funding is forthcoming.

Although I've said previously that I'm leaning towards wanting to see 35011 restored as rebuilt due to Colin Gifford's stunning photo of it at speed in this form, I can see that an unrebuilt does fill a glaring gap in the Bulleid market, and wish the project well. I hope a new home is found during the course of this year so that things can move onward and upward.

 

The BFB wheels are already rather generously provided with pockets by their very design. Take a look at this picture of 257 Squadron, and you'll see that actually it does have balance weights in the wheels, they're just cast into adjacent pockets and are not immediately obvious. This is because Bulleid only omitted the reciprocating balance ( the presence of which causes hammer blow). If he'd left out the rotary balance (the motion of the crank pins and coupling rods is entirely rotary, relative to the locomotive), then that would also have caused hammer blow.

Looking at photos, I would say that the rebuilds just had plates welded on to extend the pockets, otherwise a complete new set of wheels for every MN would have got expensive. Balance weights on spoked wheels were often formed by riveting plates either side of plain spokes and filling the gap with lead. However...

Holcroft claims the absence of reciprocating balance was his idea, and it was certainly trialled on a Schools before the Pacifics were built, with satisfactory results. The effect of leaving out reciprocating balance on a three cylinder engine is that you eliminate hammer blow but have unbalanced moments set up around the vertical axis of the engine. On the original Pacifics this was apparently fine, and when BR couldn't get enough balance weight in the wheels on the 9F they just balanced the resultant longitudinal force and ignored the moments; it's the same theory (although hammer blow can only be reduced on a two cylinder loco balanced this way).

Given all that, I've never understood why it was introduced on the rebuilds. The rebuilt Merchants probably needed more rotary balance, because they had plain section coupling rods fitted, hence the small plates fitted to their coupled wheels, extending the possible pockets, but I've never seen a cast iron statement of why they needed full reciprocating balance. It's not as if they had particularly big and heavy valve gear compared to a Schools or a 9F.

 

The valve gear is much thinner and lighter than the coupling and connecting rods and moves through smaller distances, so I would expect it to make a negligible contribution to the forces needing to be balanced.

 

Interesting. Thanks.

 

We are proud to announce that you are now able to join the 35011 General Steam Navigation Members Society by printing the out the form below and sending it to our Membership Secretary. Plus note we can currently only accept cheque or postal orders with online card payments being possible within the next couple of weeks. If you prefer to pay in cash you can join at the upcoming The Mid Hants Railway 'Watercress Line' Spring Steam Gala.

Thank you for your support

http://www.35011gsn.co.uk/membership.html

 

A great weekend for 35011​

35011 General Steam Navigation Locomotive Group

With the Watercress Line Gala coming to an end we'd like to thank everyone who visited us, joined our society or purchased a mug. It was great to see so many people excited about this project.

 

The February Update went live this week


February Update
2/17/2016

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January has been a very productive and fruitful month for the 35011 team which saw the launch of the General Steam Navigation Locomotive Restoration Society. We had originally planned to launch the Society at the Mid Hants Railway Spring Steam Gala but because of the huge amount of people messaging us wishing to join but being unable to attend the gala we opened the society earlier than we anticipated. The amount of people signing up has been a real confidence boast to the project and we'd like to thank every one of our new member for joining us on this journey. If you are interested in joining our society you can find out more by here. At the time of publishing this article we have had over 30 people sign up to the Society in just 2 weeks which is a great start for us.


Ian Ferguson who was the winner of our competition to name our members magazine sent in this great of him showing off this prize rather appropriately in front of Blackmore Vale on the Bluebell Railway. We had 20 mugs made to sell at the Mid Hants Gala and we are happy to report that all were sold with a second batch being ordered shortly which we will be for sale online and on our Society stand at various events throughout the year.

Last weekend the Society held its first stand at the Mid Hants Railway Spring Steam Gala and despite all the horrible rain and the bitter cold we left the gala feeling rather successful. During the weekend we got to met lots of people who were very enthusiastic about our project, answered lots of questions and were thanked by several people "for doing something they never thought would happen in their lifetime". The gala proved to be a real confidence boost in terms of morale and finances so we'd like to thank everyone who came to see us. Amongst our visitors was our artist Stephen Bedser who you can see in the above picture surrounded by his design. We do have some gala appearances planned and will let you know once they are confirmed.


In our last update we mentioned that we have signed up for Easyfundarising and we are proud to report that in just 4 weeks we have raised £30. Easyfundraising is a great way to raise money for railway projects like us and we have recently joined the site. All you need to do is click on the link below and sign up. What this does is provides the project with cash donations every time you shop online. So next time you are buying train tickets or your weekly shop or pretty much anything else you can buy online go to the link below find the retailer you wish to use be it Amazon, The Trainline or many others and purchase your goods as you would do normally. It doesn't cost you anymore but we benefit from it. This is great and free way of supporting 35011. Above you can find a great video which explains how it all works and you join our EasyFundraising cause by clicking here. You can even earn free donations for us by signing up to free trials and services that don't cost a penny! You can find these on our free donations page. An example is if you sign up for Asda mobile sim card (no contract connected) they will donate 50p to GSN. Signing up with our cause will be gratefully appreciated by us no matter how small you think your donations might be.

2016 is a going to be a key year for General Steam Navigation and we have had a very successful start to the year, we are planning to keep this momentum going and secure a new home for GSN and a bright new future as a backdated Merchant Navy along with it.

Thank you for your support.

 

When I first heard of this project, which has been going on in some form or other in the background for a while I seem to recall, I really thought that this was one of those "nice to have" projects, you know, the sort that some people dismiss as dream-world.

Just shows how much I know! Good luck to you 35011 Team.