This week ends a year since the permanent board of directors was seated and the first wrench was turned. As of the end of June we had invested over 4,300 volunteer hours in the project, 3,100 of them involved working on the locomotive, tools, and facility and 1,200 involved administration.
We have removed essentially everything that needs to be removed. We have now started refurbishing the parts and getting them ready to put the locomotive back together. The last major parts to be removed were the fire pan and the shaft and supports connecting the brake cylinder to the brake linkage. Many of the parts on the locomotive, including the brake hangers, frame cross-ties and brake shaft support bolts, and crossheads are tapered. For those that have to be removed we have several custom press tools which use a Port-a-power to do the pushing. The more stubborn pieces also require heat from a torch. A good number of them come loose with a resounding BANG, scaring the bejesus out of everyone close.
The front equalizer with the oblong holes pictured in an earlier post should be as good as new by the end of the week. A local machine shop has it and is donating the work to build up the missing material, line bore it, and press in bushings. The front truck equalizer arm and the associated cross-equalizer were also badly worn. Both have been built up by welding and reshaped to match the original drawing. There was over two inches of accumulated wear in the suspension supporting the lead truck. That may have been why when we received the locomotive one of the front driver bearings had been overheated and damaged - the front driver was taking a lot of the weight that should have been carried by the lead truck.
We have been working on the cab for several months. It seems like everyone who worked on the locomotive during the 20 years it was in service wanted to add something and had to cut a new hole to do it - often with a torch. All the extra holes have been welded up and a badly rusted strip of metal along the bottom edge has been replaced. The cab just came back from a company who donated sand blasting and applying a coat of primer - black on the outside and green inside. Soon we will be applying the oak custom milled tongue and groove ceiling, prefinished with a green stain and sealed, which was donated by a local millworks company.
We completed all the boiler ultrasound measurements - I believe the final count was over 3,000 of them. The engineer has looked at all the data and most of the boiler is in good shape. However, the firebox needs extensive repairs and the firebox stays, flues and tubes all need to be replaced. Our locomotive has the earlier of two boiler designs for this class of locomotive. In the later design the firebox crown and side sheet were slightly thicker material. The later design also had a number of flexible stays where the earlier boiler had rigid stays. One of the Ft. Eustis locomotives of this design had the boiler rebuilt in the 1950s and at that time additional rigid stays were replaced with flexible stays. Where possible, we will be incorporating the upgrades.
Drivers look good and the tires appear to be nearly new. Unfortunately, many years of sitting caused some minor pitting on the journals and one journal was damaged when it was over heated. The drivers will be taking a trip to the Lower 48 to a shop that can turn and roller burnish the journals. A decision was made when the locomotive was designed to forgo Babbitt liners in the driver journal boxes and use bronze. This was done to save time and money in light of the intended use of these locomotives. We are looking into upgrading the journals to Babbitt lined.
A task to be taken up soon is to rebuild the Pyle-National K-240 turbo generator. Does anyone have any experience rebuilding one or have tech data? We have the 1945 ICS text on headlights that has a bit of information on generators and a cut-away drawing with the parts names identified for the K-240.
We have had considerable success in collecting technical information and drawings. (This has been one of my pet projects and I have spent a couple of hundred hours looking for, obtaining, identifying, and arranging drawings into a user friendly filing system.) Between the Lima collections at CSRM and the Allen County Historical Society, the Baldwin collection at the Pennsylvania State Archives, and another collection of Baldwin drawings for the S-160s which had been poorly copied onto microfilm, it looks like we will have most of the drawings. We were also able to obtain about 450 pages of engineers' hand written notes from Allen County, including original stress calculations on the boiler and components such as rods, axles, and wheels. We have obtained almost the entire set of boiler drawings. An interesting finding from the engineering notes was that much of the design work and many of the components were adapted from a War Department 2-8-2 for which the production was cancelled before the complete run was done. Many of the components which had already been made but which had become surplus because of the cancellation were incorporated into the first orders for the S-160 2-8-0s.
We continue to add to our collection of tools used to overhaul the locomotive. Through the generosity of a couple of our supporters we just received and are in the process of setting up and getting tooling for a used Birmingham vertical milling machine with a 49" table.
One has to have an immense respect for the people who designed these things. All this work was pre-CAD and pre-computer. I took particular note of the amount of work that went into weight and suspension calculations and design and into determining how to balance all the rotating and reciprocating parts. A substantial part of the engineering data was related to these two areas. Just the indexes of all the parts used on a locomotive and subsequent changes must have taken a tremendous amount of work.
In addition to doing some hands on work and working with drawings, much of my volunteer time this year has been dedicated to the administrative functions of the corporation. If anyone is considering taking on this type of project, don't underestimate the administrative workload. I think we were all blind sided by the amount of work that doesn't involve working on the locomotive. Book keeping and bill paying, obtaining non-profit status with the IRS, preparing income tax returns, public relations and fund raising, reports for grantors, and documenting volunteer hours all take considerable time. Essentially all of the work done to date has been done by volunteers, but a full 25% of the hours spent have involved administration.
Below is a photo of one of our volunteers applying journal protection prior to cleaning and sand blasting the wheel centers so they can be inspected for cracks and defects. (Photo courtesy of Stewart Sterling.)
For more photos and information on the project see
http://alaskarails.org/, particularly the "restore" button in the No. 557 Info section.
