Carson & Colorado Railway

Although we did not work on-site in December, we did make some progress with the side rods. Through an exchange, we have been able to do some limited work in the D&S machine shop during off hours which has allowed us to get what would otherwise be difficult work done extremely fast.

The first step in the work was to true up some of the rod holes. About half of the holes were out of round or too rusted to be serviceable. The rods were set up on the horizontal boring mill and the holes machined round again. The overall center to center distances were also confirmed. Once round, Travis and Charlie got to work making new brasses. While brass was flying, Jeff polished all the rods and cleaned out all of the grease fittings and Patrick converted the final few oil fittings to grease fittings.

Although work has gone quick we are only about half way through. We hope to be complete by the end of January and have the rods back in Independence in February.

In museum news, we would like to thank the Friends of the Eastern California Museum for giving $40,000 towards the building project providing Inyo County will match the funds! We are getting closer to having a permanent roof over the #18!

Better late than never. Over the weekend of November 21st and 22nd we gathered in Independence to continue the restoration of SP #18. On this weekend we continued the tedious work on the plumbing and various other detail work. Lots of little things left to do, but all the little things add up.

We reinstalled large sections of the air lines, like the cooling pipes on the sides of the air reservoir tanks.

The new air equalizer tank was also bolted on under the engineer side running board and new straps to hold it on had to be fabricated. Several fittings all over the engine got anti-seize added and tightened up. While this was going on work was continuing in the cab. At the last work session the new boiler jacketing was installed in the cab. With that done we reinstalled the water glasses, hydrostatic lubricator, and a few other pieces of plumbing, hopefully for the last time.

Other small but important tasks completed included installing the wood flooring on the firemans side of the cab, measurements were taken for spiral wound gaskets for injectors and water glasses, the headlight was bolted on, and the sand dome was assembled and the top cover was added.

One very critical job was measuring the center to center lengths on the drivers, then finding the center of the piston stroke and the extreme ends of stroke.

It was discovered before we removed the drivers in 2012 that they were spaced differently than the SP spec sheet called for. The reason for this was not known at the time, and when we reinstalled the drivers we trammed them according to the spec sheet. However in October while working on the rod brass we discovered that both of the main rods are 1/4″ shorter than originally called for. Because of the available material on the small end of the rods, this difference in rod lengths is to significant to safely make up by offsetting the rod brass and holes. We could make new main rods, expensive, so instead we will make accommodations just like the SP did, by moving the drivers forward in the frame 1/4″.