Deltic

An easy way to feel your age (if you're me) is to visit the repair yard and workshops at the Bo'ness railway museum. Up in the observation deck you can look down on the engineers working on old rolling stock and locos. It's all there; overhead cranes, lathes, heavy presses, drilling machines, greasy rags and gas bottles and the mechanical noise of it all. The glorious whirring motors, clangs and clunks, chatter and banter of a working workshop. Real people working with real metal today but at the same time each one stepping back in time to save part of the past somehow. 

Outside in the yard are piles of precious rolling stock and junk. More than is ever likely to be repaired here. It seems that there's a can't say no policy when equipment is offered here so it arrives and sits. Nobody wants to scrap anything. Some people just love those discarded machines, even on this huge and almost unworkable scale. I don't know what the plan is for the Deltic (above), it's rough and needs a bit of tinkering. The (Deltic) engines are out, maybe being refurbished, so I'd like to think, but the engine and chassis look like they need major TLC. A real tyre kicker and project for the black fingernail gang.