YEC 1382 ‘Unittie’ The Long Term Project, Part 1

As some of you may know I have been involved in the restoration of YEC 1382, soon to be named ‘Unittie’. This project has been ongoing since 2014 and is now approaching the end.

Rolling back To The Beginning

Back in mid 2014 a good friend of mine told me that he’d been given the offer of taking on the restoration of Yorkshire Engine Co.( YEC) 0-6-0DE (Diesel Electric) more commonly known as a ‘Half Janus‘ due to it looking like half the YEC’s Janus Locomotive.

The reason I was told this is because it was not a project he could complete alone. I can only assume that I was the one to be asked because i’ve somehow thought to be trusted to do so and also due to the prior knowledge of working on other Half Janus’ at the AFRPS.

Before agreeing to the deal we arranged a visit to go down and see the locomotive. It was currently resident at Rocks By Rail, in Cottesmore.

From this day we agreed with the current owner to become custodians of YEC 1382.

It took a few weeks to get the agreements written up and signed but as soon as this was done we were back down for the first official working day.

Moving Home Ready To Start The Restoration

Before the move took place there were a few preparation tasks that needed to be done first. Removing loose items and things that would get easily damaged in transport.

We also needed to perform a full condition report on the loco as a to fulfil an acceptance requirement for its new home.

This was done in November of 2014:


Once everything was all in place and it move approved. Transport was booked for May 2015.


Below is some photos taken during the move.


The Restoration

The First Day

Another condition of the locos arrival was that within a rather short amount of time It needed to run ‘a trip’ around the Scunthorpe Steelworks site.

Within a few days were were back down doing our First Restoration day. the first task was to assess the condition of the Engine, generator, Traction Motor and Control Electrics.


A friend we have dragged into helping with the paintwork started taking tracing of the logos and writing on the loco.

Charlie taking tracings of the original markings


During this time I had started testing and checking out the Loco electrics. One problem that was found was that none of the battery terminal cables had been labelled correctly and it was difficult to trace the cables due to them being all bundled up. The only information we could go on was a scratched on drawing on the underside of the battery box lid and a wiring diagram for a Janus and on neither of these did the identifying numbers match up.

Our first best guess unfortunately did not go well and damaged one of the ‘Start / Run’ switch contacts.


This was replaced with one of the spares that come with the loco, cables swapped around and we tried again. This time all went well and we could begin testing the control circuits.

Please See Part 2 Here.

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