Illinois Railway Museum Blog

It was a day of downs and ups in the steam shop.  The order is significant,  despite a couple of early set-backs it became a very successful day.  I had to leave mid-afternoon for an evening event downtown.  The major progress was achieved in the evening ..... hmm, there may be a connection there !!.  

We keep pushing forward on 1630.

·         When we arrived in the morning, Dennis had completed the required welding during the week but no more rivets had been placed.  It turned out that a couple of the mid-week team had been sick or unavailable so no riveting was possible on Wednesday.

·         In addition Kevin had been in during the week and made great progress on needle chipping the front of the locomotive ready for repainting.  In addition he had done a lot of cleaning in the shop.  This is a major part of work in the steam shop.  A lot of what we do creates dust and, without periodic cleaning, the place gets into a real mess.

·         We are now getting close to the first tests with water in the boiler to check the sealing of all the tubes that we have fitted.  So various jobs were scheduled to prepare for this.  One big requirement is obviously water, which we need to supply from the treatment plant in the steam lead and have available for use in the shop.  For this we use the tankage of our milk car. 

Jim West, who was conductor of the day, managed to schedule things so that the car was switched over to the steam lead by the service locomotive before the first train.  Thanks Jim. 

Thereafter things went downhill !.  We initially had problems with leakage from the inspection cover of the pump in the boxcar.  Good thing it was near 90 degrees as a number of us had unexpected showers.  Then, having overcome this and linked the milk car to the supply, we discovered that two key valves in the milk car were split.  It seems that the car was not completely drained last Fall and the valves froze.  Good thing we started this a little ahead of when we absolutely need the water for testing. 

During the day Jeff removed the damaged valves from the car so that replacements can be ordered for fitting next weekend.  Stu and Jeff worked on the water treatment plant so that the softener, which was out of commission due to a leak, is now working again and properly sealed the inspection cover on the pump to avoid further showers.

·         Rick, Paul and others worked on the smokebox front, cleaning this up and preparing the gasket.

Paul cleans the mating face of the smokebox face plate

·         Eric continued work on the super heater flues in the front tube sheet.  He is ensuring that any excess ferrule is removed and starting to flare the tube ends in preparation for beading the ends once we have ensured that they are water tight.

·         Several of us worked on fitting the plates in the cab, on which the gauges are mounted, and then fitting the boiler pressure gauges to these.  The water level gauges were also fitted.  All of these are needed for the initial hydro testing.  It is really nice to see fittings coming back into place on the back head, which has been bare for more than a year.

The pressure and water gauges are now back on the fireman's side

Pressure and water gauges - Firemans side

and on the engineer's side as well.

Pressure and water gauges - Engineers side

·         Then, after I left, the main event started.  The three remaining rivets were placed.  THE RIVETING IS COMPLETE.  Some of them still need to be caulked but the riveting itself is done.  The next key job is to fit the two flexible stays.  The stays fit into the two open sleeves that can be seen just above the rivets in the front face of the firebox wrapper.

 

All rivets now in place

So another major milestone is achieved.  The patch is now fully installed and we can move forward to testing and reassembly.

Nigel