A great summer day in Oyster Bay

Saturday August 28th 2010-
While 2 of our volunteers were going over the Alco Worlds Fair Cab display to fix the air horns-clogged baffles, a 3 man crew was hard at work moving the cribbing under the turntables motor frame assembly in order to get to the unprimed areas.

With this task accomplished, they set to work getting a coat of primer on quickly. As the day turned out quite warm, the primer dried in a few hours, so they were able to get a 2nd coat onto the area. They also were able to get 2 coats of primer on all of the brake assembly and platform brackets as well.

A few of our other volunteers were still going over parts inside the storage trailers in order to be able to put together as many sub-assemblies as possible to make it faster to reassemble #35's frame and drive train.


We had one of the locomotive rebuild contractors from Steam Operations Corp (Keith Muldowney) on hand to go over some measurements that were missed on the last visit and to review our progress on parts renewal and breakdowns.

WE (OBRM Volunteers) are on schedule and if the air compressor situation continues at this pace, we should be able to complete the needle scaling of the drive wheels/tender truck assemblies/locomotive frame by the end of November.
One of the drive wheel shas been completely stripped of paint on the outside.Next week the backside will be stripped of the primer that was applied when the new tires were installed, years ago.


We also picked up the rear end of #35's locomotive frame with our trusty forklift in order to move the cribbing underneath. This enabled us to get to the drawbar pin which had been rusted in place for years. We made sure to drain any standing water in the pocket, then we put a jack on a timber under the frame and applied upward force to the pin. From the top, we poured in a "creeping" oil known as "Kroil".
This stuff is amazing and should allow us to pop the pin over the course fo the next few weeks. Then the pin and the pin pocket will get polished while the drawbars will be removed, stripped and coated with cosmoline for long term storage.


Remember that while all of this work is being performed behind the barriers, we are also [color=#FF0000]open for business [/color]and have many familys and railfans visiting with us. Our docents are kept busy with these visitors and we are working diligently on our "SPEND A DAY IN OYSTER BAY" program.

MADDOG