Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Another week of steady if unspectacular progress in anticipation of the inspection next weekend.

On 1630:

·         It was good to see that the welding contractor had made a start on attaching the safe ends to the super heater flues during the week.  The process is not yet complete as each is first welded with the high penetration 6010 welding rod and will subsequently be surfaced with the harder 7018 rod.

The first two flues now have their new safe ends

For my peace of mind we test fitted the two that now have the ends attached into the boiler.  The sensitivity with this is that the finished flue is a little over 17 feet long.  Most will have sections welded to each end of the original tube and these are not just butted onto the end but tapered and partially inserted into the original tube.  The objective is that the finished flue must fit between the tube sheets with a 1/4 inch projection at each end.  Less is a disaster, meaning that the flue has to be re-welded, but excess means work as it will have to be ground off.  So a lot of measuring and calculation went into determining how long each of the three pieces should be  to give the right final length for each flue.  Much to my relief the first two are good and accurate to maybe 3/16th inch.  On this basis we re-checked all the remaining ones so all is set for the welder to move forward.

·         This also allowed us to evolve a safe and effective means of "loading" the flues into the boiler.  This is not trivial as they are both heavy and 17 feet long.  The fork lift proves ideal for this as we can lift the flue to the required height and then slide it from the forks to the tube sheet.

·         Work was started on bending and fitting the new pipe work along the side of the boiler.  The first one being replaced feeds the cylinder lubricators.  Good progress was made on this and it was in part a learning exercise so that subsequent work should move faster.  Although small diameter overall, this is heavy duty (schedule 80) pipe as it carries steam pressure.  So it is by no means easy to bend.  The conclusion so far is that it can be bent with reasonable accuracy by hand with no tendency to collapse if you use the acetylene torch to heat the exact area you want to bend to red heat.

Ed fitting the new pipe runs

Here you can see behind Ed where the pipe had to be formed to fit around the riveted seam of the boiler barrel.

·         The cleaning and thread clearing on the super heater bolts was completed.  We now have the required 27 clean, lubricated and ready for immediate use when we come to fit the elements, hopefully in the Spring.

·         Mike, Ralph and others continued forming the test patch for the firebox.  This was heated and formed to fit into the sloping face of the front tube sheet, which is the most tricky part of the bending, where the patch is not a simple curve but must be bent in three dimensions.  Based upon this work was started on the second test piece that will be used to prove the process of forming before the actual boiler sheet is done.

·         Hopefully some more progress was made after I left early to attend the Board meeting.  That was an interesting session that left me with no doubt on the importance to the museum of getting 1630 into service in 2013 !!.

In other areas:

·         Machining of the 4th axle box for 428 was progressed.

Ralph sets up the last box for machining

·         Rick removed the rust form the compressor housing and primed it.  Hopefully we can paint this during the week and avoid further deterioration ahead of the winter.

·         Bob milled the engine mounts for the new motor that the track department are fitting to the tamper.

Nigel