ALUMINUM BALL VALVES

Inspire by Judith's image I decided to drive up to Frome as the steam loco through Bridgwater had been cancelled.
The drive was awful, pouring down heavy around Glastonbury up and also back.
When I eventually found the bridge I was surprised by the size of the walls, either Judith is a giant or else she must have stood on a tall box !
Looking at the images I was also surprised how much the track tilted.
Loads of steam

I must admit I am not a fan of this style of loco, I had hoped to see the Castle class. These Bulleid designs just look like boxes on wheels, not like the superb locos in God's Wonderful Railway.

The SR West Country and Battle of Britain classes, collectively known as Light Pacifics or informally as Spam Cans, are classes of air-smoothed 4-6-2 Pacific steam locomotive designed for the Southern Railway by its Chief Mechanical Engineer Oliver Bulleid. Incorporating a number of new developments in British steam locomotive technology, both classes were amongst the first British designs to utilise welding in the construction process, and to use steel fireboxes, which meant that components could be more easily constructed during the wartime austerity and post-war economy.[2]

They were designed to be lighter in weight than their sister locomotives, the Merchant Navy class, to permit use on a wider variety of routes, including those in the South-west of England and the Kent coast. They were a mixed-traffic design, being equally adept at hauling passenger and freight trains, and were used on all types of services, frequently far below their capabilities. A total of 110 locomotives were constructed between 1945 and 1950, named after West Country resorts or Royal Air Force (RAF) and other subjects associated with the Battle of Britain.

Due to problems with some of the new features in Bulleid's design, such as the Bulleid chain-driven valve gear, sixty locomotives were rebuilt by British Railways during the late 1950s.[3] This produced a locomotive design highly similar to that of the rebuilt Merchant Navy class.[4] The classes operated until July 1967, when the last steam locomotives on the Southern Region were withdrawn from service. Although most were subsequently scrapped, twenty locomotives avoided this fate and instead found new homes on heritage railways in Britain.
Thanks for Wikipedia

Stoddard Silencers Steam/Gas Vent Silencers. Unsilenced vent valves and safety valves releasing high pressure gases to the atmosphere generate noise due to high velocity flow through the valve and turbulence created when the vent stream mixes with the atmosphere.