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Al

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Hi, In my Merry Christmas post, Renegade told me to call his brother Doyle Mc Cormick I was in Portland, he has some interesting projects. The number at the roundhouse is 503 872 1876. Tell him Lon sent me. I followed instructions. This is an old Roundhouse in SE Portland. The guys there restore old locomotives. When I got there, I asked if I could look around and take pictures. They said there is only 1 rule. Don't get hurt because they would have to take me out on Powell st and leave me there and swear a truck ran over me. Otherwise everything is open. There are two nearly twin large steam locomotives. One is the Freedom Train Locomotive. Both are built on identical 65 foot cast steel frames. Then there is a 100 year old Baldwin locomotive that they are restoring for someone. It is just the frame with the boiler and firebox on it. Cab and the plumbing off. Next is a Diesel Doyle owns and is restoring. He has two other engines outside. He got found it and another twin in Mexico. His with no engine or drive train. The Smithsonion got the other one. He has found an engine and is putting it in and restoring it. The two big engines are owned by the city of Portland. The big engines weigh about 450,000 lbs. and about 479.000 lbs with the boilers full of water and ready to travel. They are oil fired and can burn anything. With the tenders they are about 110 feet long. Both are capable of in excess of 100 mph if you have the nerve to take them there. The drive wheels are about 7 feet in diameter and you travel 21.5 feet per revolution. The Wheels have counterweights cast in them to compensate for the weight of the connecting rods. The connecting rods on each side weigh about 5000 lbs and at 60 mph this mass and the pistons are changing direction 245 times a minute or around 4 times a second. At 100 it is porportionately more. The say it goes through resonate vibration speeds where you just have to open it up and get through it and it smoothes out and goes to the next resonate speed. These are speeds you cannot maintain. The one engine is about 4000 hp and the other nearly 5000 due to different piston sizes. They have boilers with about 3 inch flues, but the steam is superheated up to about 1000 degrees by running it through tubes inside the flues and reusing the heat through the flues. I didn't get to visit with Doyle all that long, he was dealing with pickup problems. So I picked some info from Roy who was there. One thing, they have to make what parts they need as there is no NAPA for steam locomotive parts. It was a wonderful afternoon and typically the thing I try to do when on vacation. I have a wonderful tollerant wife. She stayed at the kids house this time, but often we are going down the road and I will see an old machine. U turn and go and look at it, knock on the door and ask about it. Often the owner is usually proud to tell you about it. She gets some more reading or crosswords done. My advice pick a good one when you marry. You also have to look at some of their things. I have a number of what I hope are interesting pictures so I will do this in 3 posts to break up the pictures in smaller groups.

This is a view of the Freedom Train engine. It has some trim added that the other engine does't have.

This is a view of the Drivers looking forward

This is a view of the engineers station in the cab.

Pic of the Firemans station on the left side of the cab

This picture shows what the engineer can see looking forward out the window. This why you always saw them with their head leaning out the side window in the cab, so they could see better.

This is a view of the other engine taken standing on the tender of the Freedom Train Engine.

This is a view taken standing on the tender of the Freedom Train engine looking over the cab and boiler. Hope these work, if someone has to fix them, thanks in advance. Al Eden
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Beautiful shots Al. I love that kind of stuff. We have Spencer shops just south of me outside of Salisbury NC that is now the NC transportation museum. They have some real nice stuff for the few years they've been doing stuff. Steam Town USA in Scranton PA is another museum restoration shop that has litarally TONS of steam and diesel railroad stuff. Truely old HP on a grand scale.
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Ooohh you'll fit right in with Rob that Rail Road geek! lol I visited one of Rob's rail road yards, I guess I never realized just how big those things are. Elon
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Great pictures and info Al. The Spencer Shops Dave speaks of are also very interesting. I belonged to a similar Society here in S.E. Michigan for about ten years or so. http://southernmichiganrailroad.org/
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Great pictures,Al,looks like you had quite an enjoyable afternoon! We walked around the Illinois Railway Museum a few years ago. That's also quite a place,highly recommended to anyone interested in railroading. http://www.irm.org/
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Those are some Beautiful Engines there.I have always like Steam engines and have always wanted to take a ride on one.Thanks for sharing the pictures Al.
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This website has a lot of cool old iron. I want to sign up for the engineeer class. They are up in Lancaster Pa. [url]http://www.roughandtumble.org[/url] JH
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Here's another railroad museum -- in East TN, near my retirement destination. Instead of narrow gauge, they drove innovation of smaller locomotives for standard guage that could operate in mountain gorges. They were used primarily for logging. The Little River became famous far beyond its remote mountain origins, due in large part to its innovations in railroad motive power, which included invention of the first 2-4-4-2 articulated Mallet, and the smallest 4-6-2 Pacific ever built for North American standard gauge. http://littleriverrailroad.org/ Check out their fundraising calendar, using historical pictures here: http://littleriverrailroad.org/calendar2006.htm And, here's a "registry" of surviving steam engines, with supposedly 2,000 pictures: http://www.steamlocomotive.info/
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Very interesting Kent. I would immagine that the little river would have had something to do with pencer shops at one time or another with th elittle river tying in to the Southern RR back then. Also Spencer Shops have a restored Shay locamotive runing and bring it out on special occations. It's something to see with all the external drive shafts and pinion gears in opperation. I know I've heard but can't remember the orrigin but I suppose it's possible the shay may have come from the Little river line.
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WOW, those are really interesting. I have alway been fascinated by trains and Steam engines in particular. there used to be regular excursions around here, since Norfolk Southern had some well maintained late model (1950') steam engines left from the old Norfolk and western. Unfortunately they don't do that anymore:( I heard somewhere all the old steam engine have to travel to a shop in Birmingham, Alabama to have their cylinders timeed on a special device, but I don't know it to be true. You never know, as oil begins to run out and coal takes back over, they might be back. There was some interesting research on clean burners done in South Africa and Argentina in the 80's.
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