The last week I have been helping out with the 154 and to be honest I think today went really well given the circumstances. Due to various reasons the original idea of 2 weeks of testing was not able to happen. The jacketing was finished last weekend and there have been many things going on this week. Since last weekend it has been a 7am to at least midnight every day. Put a fire in it Thursday for the first time with it all together ( but still a ton of small stuff to do) it went ok, but there was a major leak with the throttle valve, very tight lead truck, very tight driver bearings and a handful of other stuff. So we had to drag it with the southern SW1 to the river on Friday afternoon and work it on there. Basically we had to get it to river by Friday to make sure it would be ready for today, otherwise it would have been much easier to work on it at the Knoxville loco works shop. Once at the river we moved many of the tools there as well and began the work. Just pulling it down there loosened it all up, but uncovered another the problem, which the binder that holds the bearing block in place on a driver was loose and this would have to be dealt with once at the river.


After we got it there people stayed all night working on it and pretty much got it all straightened out. The throttle was good, binder, bearings- all good. BUT....it had not been test run really under its own power so were being really easy with it. Then on the right side a bolt the holds the crosshead guide broke due to the tram on the drivers being a little out of adjustment. This is what sidelined it, will require some investigation into what caused it, a trip back to the shop and some work to get it fixed. One injector and the air pumps also were a bit of a issue. The good news is that it did run good- well timed, plenty of steam, plenty of power, very tight etc. So will be running good once it can be tested and some of these little things dealt with. 203 will be pulling the train tomorrow.

Here are a few pics from the last few days.

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