Keeping Heritage Skills Alive - Buy a Loco Dragbox

Aim

We need a new "Drag Box" to ensure our volunteers can continue learning and developing heritage engineering skills

We are an educational charity aiming to keep alive Heritage Engineering skills using the restoration of a 1918 built steam locomotive as a platform.

This is the loco before we started - "scrapyard condition"

We have received a £50,000+ grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to allow us to run a series of sub-projects teaching and developing specific skills but we do need to provide  match funding of over £8,000.

A major item needed is a new "drag box" (the bit of the loco that allows it to connect to the tender) and we have chosen the purchase of this as a focus for  part of our match funding

The wasted metal can be seen above - one of our volunteers can be seen learning how to remove the old rivets from the buffer plate  (the drag box itself sits behind)

The  project consists of a (heavy) casting being made from a pattern (we have been able to use a pattern made by another group  allowing us to make a big saving), the casting then needs to have its edges machined so that it will fit snugly between the locomotive frames.  The final action will be to rivet the piece into place - this will involve our volunteers and provide a valuable training project on hot metal riveting as well as the techniques involved in safely positioning heavy structures

But first we need our drag box !!!

Full details of our sub-projects and progress can be seen on our website at www.2874trust.org 

This project successfully funded on 26th July 2021