August 22, 2017 I have a few items to reveal this week. Our firebrick crew formed around the combustion air inlet tubes and put in place the castable refractory around them.​ Repairs are needed at the floor inlet box as much of the metal has wasted and is very thin. Replacement plates were cut Saturday […]

August 14, 2017 A few weeks ago test plugs were fabricated for the superheater header to be installed in place of the superheater bundles. This enabled us to pressure test each vertical column of superheaters as they are installed insuring we have a good seal on each bundle. Our crew has been hard at work […]

August 2, 2017 Since our successful hydrostatic boiler test workers have been inserting superheater bundles on each side of the boiler leaving a work area in the middle. We had superheater header plugs fabricated so as each column of superheater bundles can be tested for leaks before moving on to the next column. After testing […]

July 11, 2017 It has been a while since I wrote a TW3, mostly due to the many photos available on our website and Facebook. After all you know what they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words!” Anyway, there needs to be a written account of activities ​from time to time. Our air […]

June 13, 2017 This week was very busy as more sheet metal jacketing was fitted to the smoke box area of the locomotive.​ Our painting crew has almost finished the sanding of the tender. They feel it will have a new coat of paint by this coming Saturday. We worked on the last of the […]

June 7, 2017 For the good news the 26L air brake components and piping installation is complete. Crews are testing the system and have begun adjusting the slack adjusters. Our painting contractor has begun sanding the tender for final painting. Workers are sanding each rivet removing orange peel and paint runs from the last paint […]

May 23, 2017 The work, for the most part, mirrored the past several weeks as we continually prepare for the official FRA hydrostatic test. Many of the minor st​aybolt leaks are being closed by Dr. Scott A. We now have one washout plug to address and a few studbolt leaks. The secondary dynamo piping was […]

May 10, 2017 Since my last writing we are still dealing with those old pesky rigid staybolts and stud bolt leaks. We performed two low pressure water tests to work on the leaks we discovered during the last hydro. This past Wednesday we performed a normal hydro bringing the pressure up to 125% of operating […]

April 26, 2017 This week we performed another low pressure hydro test on the boiler and found still more pesky stud bolt leaks. The boiler was drained and work began on the stud bolts and one small washout plug which was almost inaccessible and three more small ones on top. A bolt-on jig was fabricated […]

April 19, 2017 With the results of our preliminary hydro test last week we began repairing the minor leaks located around staybolts caps, washout plugs and a few stud bolts. Our air brake crew continues putting the system through it’s paces isolating various components to test others. The automatic train brake valve is operating normally […]