Illinois Railway Museum Blog

From this point forward I'm going to start summarizing the updates by week instead of by day like we've done in the past. That might make it easier to post a little more info with my limited time. Also, I'll be making separate blog posts for the progress on 92 starting next week.

Anyway, earlier in the week Dan and I made it out to the shop one evening to work on the 7525 and 92. While Dan focused on testing the electrical system of 92 and making a list of work that it will be needing, I crawled under the 7525's number 3 traction motor to perform some cleanup. A few weeks ago, Dan had meggered all the motors and we also knew that the number 3 had flashed and needed some work. The armature was reading .1 megohms, which is not good at all.



There were obvious signs with freshly melted bronze on the brush holders and zaps from the end of the armature to the motor case. I spent a few hours slotting the entire commutator, using a lining bar to move the loco an inch or two at a time to rotate the motor and wiped everything down that I could reach with some motor cleaner to remove any carbon tracks that might be present. Slotting is where you take a file designed to fit in between the bars of the commutator and essentially file out anything that is in the slots, copper balls from flashing, carbon, dirt, etc., anything that'll conduct from bar to bar. While cleaning and inspecting the bottom of the motor, I noticed two broken springs on the same spring pack on the back holder. Made a note that it'll have to come out to be repaired. After the cleaning and slotting, megging again brought it up to .6 megohms, better.

On Saturday morning, Erik and Nick continued sanding in the cab of 411. They spent much of the day making a huge amount of progress getting most of it ready for primer.



I worked on getting the holder out of the motor on 7525 to replace the bad springs. Little did I know I would find a hole blown in the bottom of it, which is what burned through the springs. I cleaned it up, removed and cleaned all the insulators before putting it back together and reinstalling in the motor. Megged again and not it's showing just over 1 megohms, much better. We'll give it a try this season and see how it performs.





There were a number of people working on the 92, including Dan, Laddie, Nick, Erik, Brian, Colton and myself. There was a lot of paint scraping going on inside, more work on the electrical system, and some work on the air system.

Erik and I also installed a fitting on the 7525 to make prelubing the engine far easier than what we were doing.



Thanks to all these guys for all their hard work!