Below: This morning Lewin’s boiler arrived back from Alton Engineering following completion of its rebuild. The view below shows it aboard Dave Gibson’s lorry, along with the remains of the 1990s fitted smokebox (of wrong pattern for our purposes), 1990s chimney and also the original Savage boiler from the steam gallopers, which had also been rebuilt by Alton.

Below: Lewin’s boiler is small – the centre engine boiler is absolutely tiny! It clearly illustrates just how hard the centre engine has to work to keep up with the demand of the ride.

Below: A view of Lewin’s ‘face’. We will now proceed with painting the boiler pending its movement to Hetton in the next week or so to allow it to be fitted into the frames.

Below: A close up of the unusual smokebox door arrangement – the entire door comes off! It is also heavy (and will be hot when in steam). Not ergonomically brilliant! The top handrail was made at Alton and fitted to Dave Young made stanchions/knobs. The straight handrail was one of the many fittings made by Dave Young. We are now at the stage of adding all the bits…