Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Again, we must thank Nigel Bennett for forwarding another Steam Report.  The department is active and moving ahead every week, and I for one, cannot wait for the next news and progress to be reported.

"Saturday 10/29 was another good day of progress in the steam shop.

On 1630, Collin and Eric soldiered on with the air hammer on the tube plugs in the front tube sheet.  They are now down to about 15 of the the small plugs plus the larger super heater plugs to remove.  Then, rather than relax, they have the same exercise to do on the the firebox end.  A measure of their success can be seen below.

Smokebox

Every one of the plugs on the floor of the smoke box has been hammered out by the guys inside the boiler and, if you look closely, the only ones remaining to be done are the few in the top left.

Meanwhile, being too big to fit into the boiler, I was working with Vince on stripping the boiler back head.  We have now removed all the cladding and insulation along with a horrifying amount of pipe and fittings that must come off to allow the cladding to be removed.  So this is what the engineers side of the back head looked like two weeks ago.

Before

And as of last night!!

After

This proved to be a really unpleasant job.  The covering is a complex array of sheet metal covering hundreds of blocks of insulating material.  Removing it requires removing enough pipes, valves, fittings, etc. to be able to free the sheets, removing these, and then removing the insulation.  Years ago this would have been asbestos but obviously this is long gone and Tom Schneider tells us the current material is a mix of cellulose and wool.  The trouble is that after exposure to damp and steam this can become a solid mass that breaks into powder and dust as you remove it.  A key reason that there are no pictures of the intermediate stages is that I was not prepared to risk my camera in the dust cloud!!

So, good progress, but it will be really nice when we can start to report some repair and reassembly as opposed to taking things apart.

In parallel with the work on 1630, other members of the team were able to clear the shop by storing all the parts removed in the loft, and prepare the all door box car to receive more parts as they are removed.  Others continued on the axle boxes and wedges being rebuilt for the UP 428."