Driving trailer 749 took another step towards completion on Sunday 15th November.

As followers of the 80 Class project will know, unfortunately the initial repainting of the roof didn't age well, and the paint failed pretty soon after being applied. By and large this was simply down to the galvanised roof finally throwing off the years of paint that had been applied to it - something galvanised steel is notorious for!

Whilst we've seen the main part of the roof tackled by Robert using a roller with noxyde, for the driving cab end we were delighted when one of the Translink painting team from York Road, Justin McConnell, offered to come down and respray the dome.

This uses single-pack Fleet Polyurethane from Coachfinish - NI Limited, the same type as used by Ulsterbus and by us for the Park Royal carriage two years ago, rather than the two-pack paint the sides were done with in York Road. The reasoning was we don't have the facilities to safely do two-pack paint, and as the dome is GRP it doesn't need the same level of protection as the metalwork. However it's still a very long lasting protection system.

The weather has not been kind to us, getting colder and colder and soon it would be too cold to paint inside our workshop (which is neither heated nor insulated) and so it was a race against time to get this done. Although last Sunday the atmosphere conditions outside were not ideal it was still on the right side of doable, and with a cold front predicted to come this week, the decision was taken to take the plunge!