Illinois Railway Museum Blog

It is a rather brief update this week.  I made it back to the shop on Sunday after spending Saturday travelling back from New Zealand.

A lot of activity was apparent from Saturday and continued on Sunday.  After a week, 1630 no longer looks like an operational locomotive.  The main activity on Saturday was to thoroughly drain her and then winterize (primarily running on air to blow any residual water out of the system).

A number of parts have been removed to facilitate work over winter.  This is not unexpected.  The intent had always been to carry out test running to identify anything that needs to be dealt with as maintenance activity during the winter.  The main objective of my trip to Union on Sunday was to work with Brian Davies before he leaves to produce a full list of work identified during the test running.  While there is nothing particularly threatening it is a long list that will keep us busy over winter.

The work also needs careful planning as, for example, it is important to deal with everything that may require us to pressurize the boiler to allow testing before we move on to things that require removing items that allow air to escape from the boiler !.

The boiler lagging already looks substantially less complete.  The securing bands must all be removed to allow painting of the sheet metal and this was started on Sunday.

Visitors to the shop will notice that the end covers have been removed from the valve chambers.  It is not planned that work will be done on the valves this winter but it was apparent during running that the valves are leaking significantly.  While this is not essential for 2014 running, we will measure everything up for ring replacement perhaps in the following winter.

On Sunday, Brian was removing the air tanks for painting while I worked on removing sheet metal and insulation to locate a small leakage of steam from the lubricator heater line along the boiler.

In other areas, Tom, Jim and Cameron were working on the brake shoe holders for #428.  The first of these was test fitted and looked good.  So work started on the remaining 7.

Mike was working on the plumbing for the planer.  This is an interesting 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle with a number of copper pipes, all with the same size connections, coming out of the hydraulic system into the machine.  Now is a very good time to reflect upon how nice it would have been if someone had taken some good photographs of the set-up 20 odd years ago when it was taken apart !.

So if, like me, you missed seeing 1630 as a hot steaming machine last weekend, it will be some months before you will be able to see her even looking complete again.  However, the feel in the shop is very different.  After two years fighting toward the objective of a working steam engine we now have one and must tackle the various winter maintenance tasks to make reliable operation the normal routine in 2014.

One further important piece of information –

SAVE THE DATE - The 2014 Steam Department Benefit at the Sanfilippo Estate will be on Sunday 29^th June 2014.

Nigel