Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Two weeks of steady progress in the Steam shop.

Whilst I was on my travels last week Collin and Glenn brought the super heater flues back from Astro Blast.  Apparently the cold had some pretty disastrous effects on the air brakes of the flat bed but Glenn thankfully has a lifetime  of experience in plant maintenance so the brakes were released and the trip was accomplished while the flat bed may now be more reliable in cold weather.

Jason and others did a great job in sheeting over 1630 to protect against the dust coming from the sand blasting while Dennis started on rebuilding the smoke box of the Shay.

This week the main activity was sandblasting the boiler interior on 1630.  Progress was very good.  Collin managed to clean nearly half of the boiler interior.  While the sealing and ducting is reasonably effective there is still far too much dust for other work to be done around the locomotive while this is in progress.  Below a small team feeds material to the sandblaster in center under cover of a haze of dust

Sand blasting in progress

So it was late afternoon before Mike could start further work in the firebox where he is preparing the rivet holes for the firebox patch.

There was a possibility of the specialist who will do the thickness testing on the boiler starting next weekend.  However, this cannot be done at the same time as sandblasting so we decided to hold off on this for a couple of weeks.  If we can maintain the rate of progress achieved yesterday, it should be possible to complete the sand blasting in another one or two working days.  The equipment has now been moved to the smoke box end and next weekend we will aim to seal the tube plate and target to clean that and the front boiler section (the rear barrel section was done yesterday).

The unease growing in the sand blasting team as we happily feed 50lb bags of material into the machine is that all this material has to be removed when we are finished !!.  We used about 400lbs of material yesterday alone so it is becoming apparent that we face another substantial task to clean it all out before the process is really complete.  The progress made can be seen in the picture below as large areas now show bare metal rather than the rusty covering.  But all the black "sand" must be removed.

The rear section clean but with a lot of sand to remove

After a few hours inside, Collin extracts himself from the boiler.  Not much chance of me getting in there!!.

Collin emerges from a good days work

Bob made good progress on "painting" (actually it is a specialized interior boiler coating called Apexior) the super heater flues that were brought back last week.  The ends of these were rough cut when being removed from the boiler and now need to be cleanly cut in preparation for a specialist to weld additional material at one end to bring them back to the required length (a process called "safe ending").

Phil and others made a lot of progress in cleaning out and needle chipping the spring carrier of the Shay's truck.  This now looks a great deal better than the same area as it appeared in the 12/3 update. 

Spring Tray after a deal of work

The brake linkage was also removed and cleaned.  We do however have a big decision on how to proceed with this truck.  The best way to thoroughly clean and inspect it would undoubtedly be steam cleaning.  However, that cannot be done in the shop so would require a major shunt to pull 428 out over the wheel drop to allow the truck out of the South door.

A good deal of machining work continued, primarily on the axle boxes and other parts for 428 but also on the super heater flue expanders that we will need to install the tubes back into 1630.  I really look forward to being able to report that those are in use!.

Ralph machining bushes for 428

As an aside, during my trip to the UK I was able to spend a day at the Severn Valley Railway  It is amazing the level of interest in steam railways in the UK and therefore the level of business.  Even in mid February they were running 4 trains of about 7 cars each way over a 15 mile line and seemed to have at around 50% loadings.  3 locomotives were in operation with several others usable. 

At Kidderminster GWR prairie tank 5164 comes on to the train that it will take to Bridgenorth.

Severn Valley GWR Prairie 5164

At the Bridgenorth depot 5164 shunts LMS mogul 43106, which is being steamed for a later train, before taking its own train back to Kidderminster.  Notice the genuine antique heating system for the water crane!!.  It was well below freezing that weekend.

SVR Steam shunting

A couple of hours later and the Ivatt mogul is not only steamed but has brought a train the 15 miles to Kidderminster.

Severn Valley Ivatt Mogul 43106

Nigel Bennett