MNGRR Steam Team Work Session Report 4/26/2008

Mechanical Department Work Session, April 26, 2008
By Hans Brandes
Photo By Rich Currie

Can You Spare a Day?

OK, so this wasn't a scheduled work session. But when someone calls you up and would like some help cutting and removing tubes, how can you turn that down. Another day of sunny skies and nice temperatures allowed us to haul #7 out of the house and put in another day of hard work.

Every day counts now as we are getting close to operating season and we need to plan for transporting #7 to Boothbay, hopefully in May.

In attendance was a two man team of Rich Currie ("Professor Acetylene) and Hans Brandes ("Assistant Oxygen"). With our CMO Rick Knight's permission, we went to work. Rich is very talented with working with a cutting torch so I could not turn down a change to have a private all day lesson to hone my skills with the torch.

We started the day with my assembling the hoses and torch heads. After assembly, Rich checked these all over and then the Professor gave lessons on proper settings, valve adjustments and tip clearing and cleaning. With that done, we went to work with Rich in the firebox and myself in the smokebox. We burned tubes at both ends and were able to get going at a pretty good clip. Soon tubes were starting to come out a pretty good pace. We learned not to cut too many without taking them out as they can get crossed up on top of each other and make it more difficult to remove.

Gerry Bagley stopped by in the afternoon to check on our tank supplies as we were running two torches and wanted to make sure that we would have enough gas for the next two work sessions. Running out of gas during a work session would bring us to a very quick stop.

A lunch break was taken with our favorite fallback meal of 'round steaks' from the golden arch.

This day was important for two reasons: education and volunteer hours. Education is a very important part of our charter, whether it be our volunteers or the public. Something as basic as practicing how to use a cutting torch is invaluable and expands our skillset. Volunteer hours as every hour of work we can do ourselves saves the railroad money.

So thank you Rich for spending your money for gas to drive all the way up to Portland so that we could save the railroad some money and teach an old dog some new tricks.

Next Saturday, May 3 is our next scheduled work session. We will be working on both #4 and #7 as we start putting #4 together for the operating season. Please send your monetary contributions so that #7 can be under steam once again!