High Iron

A briefing on starting up

2006-08-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted about the latest two trips up to the railroad. Real life is beginning to intercede with the impending new semester at grad school, so I slipped a bit on this blog.

Last thursday was 4 hours at the railroad, just working on the platform. I answered lots of questions about how steam engines work, and how track gets laid and maintained. I punched tickets, told people to keep their arms and heads inside the carriages, and picked up litter in the platform area. Fairly uneventful.

It's last Tuesday that was the interesting day. Number 11 had been in the shop, having its right-side injector checked. I helped him get it back onto the locomotive, and then he talked me through the process of steaming up. I can't remember it all, since there are tons of little things to do. I could work up a checklist at some point. Anyway, there are a dozen or so lubrication points, which require two different sorts of oil. There're check-valves which need to be closed at one point, and opened at others. When the engine is making steam, several components in the cab operate off that steam. When the engine is cold, however, we replicate steam with air pressure from an air compressor. The two primary components that run off this air feed are the blower and the atomizer. The blower is a pipe of live steam that exits right beneath the smoke stack in the front of the locomotive. It blasts steam up the smokestack, creating a vacuum in the front of the smokebox, which draws air through the fire. The atomizer, on the other hand, is sort of like a fuel injector in the firebox. Our engines are fired with #2 stove oil, which drips into the atomizer. The atomizer, another feed of steam, turns the oil into a mist which sprays over the fire.

Both of these components are essential to getting the fire going. You do it by lighting a few pieces of paper towel alight with a match and shoving it into the firebox. Once it's going, you turn on a bit of blower to create an airflow through the firebox, and a bit of both fuel feed and atomizer, to give the fire fuel. It'll (generally) pop to life, and then you just have to wait for 45 minutes or so to bring up the water to the boiling point.

Digging a ditch

2006-08-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Grant and I put in a 3" PVC drainage pipe. We ran it underneath the track in the Front Loop, where heavy rain water tends to pool up, and then parallel to the track for about thirty-five feet where the water can drain into a large field. This required lots and lots and lots of picking with a pickaxe, then digging and hoeing. We took care of a 4" diameter root with an axe, and then buried the whole shebang beneath eight wheelbarrow-loads of reclaimed ballast rock.

I'm feeling it in my shoulders today. I got to run the #2 again, though.

Tomorrow and Sunday are the work weekend for this month, so I'll be up there for about 9 hours. I'll take the camera.

Retaining Wall Photos

2006-08-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

A few posts back, I mentioned the head wall that we rebuilt, and that I'd take some photos. Here they are, finally:

Picking up brush, and more planting

2006-08-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

I got there bright and early this morning. Ray, Jim and I hung out in the roundhouse for a little while. I watched the two of them prep #4 "Laurel" for a day of running, and waiting for the fog to burn off a little. There was so much fog this morning.

Way back on my first day volunteering, Ellen and I cleared a ton of brush and weeds. I wrote then that

We pile the brush in neat, orderly piles by the side of the track; later we'll haul a gondola with the work locomotive and pick up all the brush for disposal.

And that's what I did this morning. Since the steam locomotives take more than an hour to steam up, and we're not open until noon on weekdays, so I'd have the track to myself (which was reassuring, since it was my first time unsupervised out on the mainline). I took #2 "Juniper", the work locomotive pictured on the right, and a flatcar, and worked around the whole track a few times. I wound up with nearly 3 car-loads of brush cleared off the track, which makes it look a lot neater.

Plus, hey, I was running a locomotive, by myself, blowing the whistle at the right places and in the right sequences (there's a code, you know).

I spent the afternoon doing more planting. I put in more liriope and lilies, like yesterday, and added a few lavenders in 1 gallon containers. I promise we're not working our way through the L plants; we're doing some Junipers later, and they start with a J!

Plants, Injectors, and Bearings

2006-08-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

Did three things today. First, I put in more plants in the planter boxes that line the platform area. We're putting in Liriope (Lily Grass or Lily Turf) and Lilies, which will hopefully tolerate the shadiness under the redwoods. I'm getting pretty good at planting, especially in the hard-packed clay dirt in those planter boxes. The pickaxe is a useful tool for loosening up massive clumps of impacted clay soil. I think there's some more to do tomorrow.

The second thing I did was ride with Grant on the footplate of #4. The two injectors on the right-hand side of the cab were acting up, so it was my job to work the injector on the left-hand side.

So what does the injector do? As the engine uses up steam to push the train, work the whistle, etc., the water level in the boiler drops. The steam injector is used to top off the water in the boiler from the water in the tender. The injector's operation is sort of like an airbrush, in which steam (either from the boiler or from the cylinder exhaust) is forced through the body of the injector, into which water is also fed. The pressure of the steam picks up the tender water and forces it through into the boiler, the same way the high air pressure in an airbrush picks up paint on its way to the nozzle. Paul Pavlinovich has written an excellent article explaining steam injectors in more detail.

So, several times during the run I opened up the feedwater valve, and then the injector steam. This forces water through into the boiler, and the boiler's water level increases. On our locomotives the injectors are all "live steam", meaning the steam feed into the injector is directly out of the steam supply in the boiler. Since using the injector saps some of the steam pressure in the boiler, we only do it during periods when the locomotive isn't under heavy use.

The two biggest jobs that a locomotive fireman has are maintaining a proper water level in the boiler and making sure the fire in the firebox is an appropriate size and temperature for the needs of adequate steam production. It's all about water and fire. I'm not at the point where I'm firing the locomotive (which in our engines is primarily about regulating the feed of fuel oil into the fire, since we don't use coal), but I've got the basics of handling the steam injectors.

Finally, I helped Grant take apart, check, and repack the bearings on a passenger car truck. The trucks are the sets of wheels at each end of the car. They call them bogies in the UK (and that's the Wikipedia entry). We lifted the car end with jacks, and rolled the truck out. Propping up the truck, we removed some bolts that hold the journal box in place. The journal box holds a set of bearings within which the axle rotates. They wear down, and need to be cleaned and repacked regularly. Next time you see a train car, look on the outside of the wheel axles. Those squarish-looking parts are the journal boxes. So I got my hands all greasy on top of the dirt from the planting. A thoroughly satisfactory day.

Photos

2006-08-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

Pretty full day yesterday, but I got up to the railroad for 2 hours to take some photos. A few of the best are below, and I've moved the whole gallery over to flickr (and updated the link on the left).

Landscaping

2006-08-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

We're going camping tomorrow, up at Lassen Volcanic National Park, so this is a quick entry. Today, Ellen and I did a little landscaping work around the front platform. We have planter boxes lining the walkway up to the depot and the platform, and we've been replacing some of the plants in them. Using pickax and shovel, we'd loosen up the soil, work in some perlite, and bed the plants (dwarf ceanothus, lily grass, and something else lily-like; I'm not really a plant guy). Then the beds got a good soaking, along with a little fertilizer.

Meanwhile, Grant was running #4 "Laurel" with the passenger trains, as is typical for weekday operations. It was a pretty warm, and after we got the planting done, I went around with Grant on the footplate. I'm beginning to notice how one needs to fire the locomotive during the run. There's a slight downhill grade running from Army Camp into the tunnel, and then an uphill grade running from the tunnel out to the Back Loop.

Anyway, just a bit of work to keep things looking spiffy.

Finished a retaining wall, and ran around on locos

2006-08-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

I left my jacket up at the shop yesterday, so I figured it was a good enough excuse to put in 4 hours or so at the railroad.

In yesterday's post I mentioned the work we'd done on the track running into the shop. Today we finished up the retaining wall, through-bolting the rail plate into the top of the wall and then filling it in with ballast. More tamping! We do a lot of tamping on this railroad, which is hard work, but it's so satisfying to ride over newly leveled and tamped track.

While getting the shop spur finished up, Ray had been steaming up #4 which had been in the shop when the track work had started. As we put away the tools (and headed in for a bowl of ice cream), Ray and Paul fired up #4 for a run. Oil-fired locomotives like ours can get soot building up in their flues, so when first steaming up you sometimes need to sandblast them To do this, you work the locomotive really hard, generating maximum draft from the firebox through to the smokestack, and then you drop in a little sand, which blasts through the flues. For a good description of the parts of a boiler, have a look at this page by Tim Overton.

I headed down just in time to see the #4 couple up to the #7 which was heading the passenger trains today. We doubleheaded a passenger train, with me riding on #4's footplate next to Ray while Grant and Harrison drove #7 behind us. Paul is supposed to send me a photo or two later on.

Then it was time to put #4 away, but yesterday Grant and I had put away #2 "Juniper" in its place. Having heard that I'd run #2 yesterday, Ray and Paul agreed that I could run #2 back down to Barn 1 (in the back half of the track) and Ray would follow us in #4. We'd put "Juniper" away in the work barn, and then I'd catch a ride back up with Ray and Paul on "Laurel". So two days in a row now I got to drive a loco on the railroad.

And two days in a row I did a lot of work, and my back is a little sore, and I'm quite tired. Good night!

Driving a locomotive for the first time

2006-08-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

Today I helped Ellen and Grant rework some of the track leading into the shop. There's a fairly tight curve that leads into a raised grade. In the shop, there's a bench topped with rail that's about 3 feet high, which allows locomotives and cars to be worked on at a comfortable height. So one can imagine that the track eventually leaves the grade, over a wooden retaining wall, and across a short linkage track to the work bench. You can see the benchwork (but not the retaining wall) in the first photo in a previous post. Anyway, the track has worked its way out of shape over time, and apparently on monday a car nearly went "on the ground" (i.e., derailed).

So today we reworked about a 25' section of track. We used a clever device called a gantry to get the track leveled. The gantry is like a 7 foot wide metal sawhorse. Dangling from the crosspiece of the sawhorse are two long screws with clamps at the bottom. By attaching the clamps to the rail and turning the two screws, you can raise the two rails to the correct height. Using an old sight level (to check the overall level of the track compared to a survey of the track) and a beam level (to check the level between the two rails), you can set the rails in the right place and then tamp the ballast into place beneath, which effectively locks the ties and the rails in place. We finished off with some reinforcing work on the wooden wall reinforcing the edge of the grade (I wish I'd brought my camera).

Grant and I then ran the work train back down to Barn #1, which is where the work cars live. We followed Ray out, who was running the passengers 'round behind #5 "Fern" who is back out of the shop with new steamchest valves. As Ray headed off down the race track, we slipped into a siding that took us down to Barn #1. At this point Grant let me take over at the controls to #2. #2 is the one which got the new carb a few posts back, and I got to have a go with switching duties on it. There's, basically, one lever that controls the throttle, and one that operates as a clutch. After dropping off the work train in the barn, I then ran back up to the mainline, waited for the inbound passenger train to pass, and followed it in for the switch into the roundhouse.

So, it was brief, but I was an engineer today! Gotta get a few photos tomorrow...

Hot.

2006-07-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

I think the temperature up at the railroad today was about 105°. At any rate, at 5 pm the thermometer at the shop — which is in the shade — read 99°. It was quite hot. Ellen and I and Joseph worked on digging up some raised planting beds near the roundhouse. The bushes which had occupied them had died from a lack of light combined with little feet. It's quite easy for a child to climb from the benches between the beds onto the beds themselves, and the bushes had long died off. It was the sort of day where one works 15 minutes and then takes a half-hour break.

The crew had rigged up some low-pressure drip sprinklers into a branch near the ticket booth, so we had about 8 square feet of gentle rain under one of the Redwoods. It was terrific on such a hot day. Grant and JP were trading shifts on locomotive number 11, a 4-6-0 10-Wheeler type named "Sequoia". I got a footplate ride with JP at one point, during which he demonstrated the things to look for when a loco is running well. It's hard to explain, actually, being a combination of the look of the smoke and the sound of the "puff". I get the feeling that it's something that takes a while to learn, like driving a stick-shift but more so.

It was Grant's day off, but he'd agreed to fill in for somebody so he was itching to get away early. I wound up working the platform for the last hour and a half. This involves punching the tickets of the passengers, keeping people on the platform behind the white line when the train is arriving or departing, and generally keeping an eye on things around the platform.

I'm on my way to take a shower and go to sleep, so I won't tell you in this post about Colorado. My wife and I went out to Denver to visit her brother and sister-in-law, and we took in a visit to the Colorado Railroad Museum and Tiny Town, but that's going to be another post.

New carburator, pulling couplers, and dressing track

2006-07-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

Today I got to the railroad just as Grant was working on #2. I promised a photo in an earlier post, and here she is. She's got a gasoline engine, basically out of a car, which runs a hydraulic drive. She was running pretty rough on Friday when we were building up the work train, which is why we used #4 (a steam loco) on Saturday for the work day. #2 isn't particularly beautiful, but unlike a steam locomotive she doesn't require constant attention to keep steam up. You just flick a switch and she goes.

Grant and Ray had an idea that the carb needed a servicing to correct the rough running. I got there just as Grant was trying to get the last of the bolts tightened up. See the radiator in the photo? Just to the left is a belt pulley that drives, I think, the air compressor. The carb is right behind that, so the air compressor had to come out. It's a bit of a pain, but everything got put back together again, and #2 is running strongly again.

I helped Ellen sand down some pieces of wood that will be painted into new opening times signs for the front gate, and then Grant and I ran down in #2 to pick up one of the gondola cars (see photo at right) which needs coupler work. We got the car back up to the railbench where #2 is in the photo above, and jacked up each end before blocking it on ties. We wheeled away the trucks, and removed the several nuts and bolts that hold the couplers in place. The repair of the couplers themselves will wait for another day, and Grant and I headed down to dress some track.

This past weekend, we'd re-levelled a long section of track, which involves dumping down lots of new ballast. After the ballast is all packed into place around the ties, it needs cleaning up. That's what dressing track is. We worked along about a 50' section, doing another round of tamping, and then using shovels to scrape ballast down to the level of the ties, and then sweeping some of the dust off. It makes the track look nice and even, but it's also good to have the ballast moved away from the railhead. It's easier to walk on, too.

So I got both greasy and dusty yesterday. I attracted a few interesting looks in the supermarket on the way home...

Day 4 - Trackwork

2006-07-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

Ballast, the rocks that you find around railroad tracks, serves at least four purposes:

It's good for water drainage
It protects rail from ground frost
It helps to stabilize the ties, preventing them from moving around too much
It helps distribute the weight of the passing train over a larger area of ground

And fine adjustments to the trackwork can be made by manipulating the ballast. This, despite the advantages, still means quite a bit of work. That's what I spent yesterday doing: working on a section of track with a group of other volunteers and staff.

Using a laser level, Ed had surveyed one 180 foot section from Flush Flat into Wet Neck, and we got to work making the gradient of the track nice and consistent all the way through the curve. The rail does descend through that whole area, but we want a smooth decline, not full of lumps and bumps. The way we get the track raised is as follows: One person jams a long, heavy, solid steel pole under one rail, lifting it a fraction of an inch. Another person checks with the laser level to see if the rail has been lifted the right height. Several other people with long, heavy, solid steel poles then pound away on the ballast next to the surrounding ties, attempting to tamp it into place and lock the rail into the right height. Then you have to check the cross-level, which is the height of one track relative to the other. So it's lots of pounding to get the ballast packed in around the ties.

I'm feeling a little sore today.

By the way, the two areas of the route that I mentioned have strange names, but there's a reason for them both. Flush Flat is named for a toilet. Before it was a railroad, the southern end of Tilden Park was an actual army camp, and the cement foundations of the old latrine are just north of the track at this curve. Wet Neck is where the track heads back into the redwoods (as you can see in the photo). In the early morning, the blast from the smoke stack knocks the dew off the branches, and it rains on the engineer's neck.

Day 3 - Building the work train

2006-07-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow and Sunday are work days, when all the volunteers descend on the Redwood Valley to get projects done. In order for things to be ready for tomorrow morning, we got a work train set up.

Ed picked me up in Berkeley and drove me up to the railroad. We met up with Grant and got to work on switching to build up the work train consist. "Consist" is the railroad term for the mix of railroad vehicles that make up the train. In this case, we made up a mixture of flatcars and hoppers for ballast. There's a spur near the barn that allows us to load ballast in from the top (fortunately, or we'd be shovelling a lot of rock), so we ran the hoppers around to fill them up. We built up the train and moved it up to a siding where the track gang will pick it up tomorrow.

To do all this switching, we used #2, which is a gasoline-powered locomotive. Steam's more romantic, of course, but our steam locos take about 2 hours to steam up, while an engineer just pushes a button on #2 and it roars to life. Or, rather, splutters. She's a bit cantankerous. I'll see if I can get a photo tomorrow.

After lunch, Grant and I took #2 and an empty hopper to recover some ballast. Previous trackwork had left a pile of "used" ballast next to the track in the front loop (near the platform), so we shovelled it into the hopper. Ballast is rock, and is therefore heavy, and shovelling it is tough on the lower back. Anyway, over the course of the day I got lots of practice coupling and decoupling cars in a train. It's a good idea to keep one's fingers out of the way! I watched how #2 is driven, and I learned some basic brakeman's signals for communicating to an engineer that it's ok to proceed, to slow down, and to stop. Very useful when switching.

I'm going up for the work day tomorrow, where I'll try to get some more photos, particularly of #2 and of some trackwork. Incidentally, if you have any questions about railroad terminology, drop me a comment and I'll try to answer it.

Day 2 - Photos and Sand

2006-07-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

I had a full day today, but I wanted to drop by the Redwood Valley for a half hour or so. I dropped off a book to add to their library, and took a few photos, which you can see here. Grant was driving Locomotive #4 "Laurel", which is a 2-4-2 Columbia Class, and his wheels were slipping on the way in and away from the platform. He asked if I could grab the sand can from the ticket booth and sand the rails in the track area. Pretty straightforward, but then I'd never done it before, so it's just one more thing that I've learned.

The photo at the right is Laurel waiting for passengers to board. That's Ray driving at this point, as Grant was taking his lunch break.

Day 1 - Clearing Brush

2006-07-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

I went up to Redwood Valley this afternoon, having called first to check that Ellen would be there. I parked in the crew lot and met up with Ellen for some foliage clearing on the track. We each took a pair of pruners and started out along the railroad's mainline*, clipping back any foliage that was close enough for kids to grab from the cars, or low enough to be a hazard. As the train comes around roughly every 20 minutes, we'd listen for the whistle and stand well off to the side to let the train pass. The sight of happy kids and parents waving to you as they roll on by is a fine thing to see.

It took a couple of hours to work all the way around the mainline, and then to work up the spurs that lead to the shop, barn, and roundhouse. We pile the brush in neat, orderly piles by the side of the track; later we'll haul a gondola with the work locomotive and pick up all the brush for disposal.

After the work was done, I went out with Grant on a run. He let me sit next to him on the footplate as he drove. I got to check out some of the basic operation of a locomotive during a run. It's a complicated balance of steam pressure, water level, fuel flow (these locos are fired with oil), and speed. Looks like it takes a long, long time to get to know how these machines work.

Edit: Someone on the crew today mentioned that several passengers had read an article in "the paper" about the RVRy. It was, in fact, in today's Contra Costa Times, and can be read here.

* the mainline is the primary stretch of track on a railroad, as opposed to sidings, spurs, and yards. The mainline is what the railroad is all about. It's also known as the "high iron", from which the name of this blog is taken.

Workin' on the Railroad

2006-07-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

This is a blog about working on the railroad. The railroad in question is the Redwood Valley Railway, which is a 15" gauge, 5" scale live steam tourist road located in Tilden Park, 1600' above Berkeley and Oakland, California. I'm Chris, and I'm totally new to the railroad world, and now I'm volunteering with the RVRy.

Earlier this summer I took a trip to England, which included a visit to the wonderful National Railway Museum in York. When I got home, I picked up Empire Express, David Bain's history of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. I read all about Huntingdon, Hopkins, Crocker, and Stanford; these were the "Big Four" directors of the Central Pacific which was attempting to build a railroad between Sacramento and Truckee, and eventually into Nevada and points East. I read all about the tremendous and tragic story of Theodore Judah's surveying and engineering work on the first part of the railroad (before dying of Yellow Fever following a trip across Panama on his way to New York).

Digging a bit more, I discovered that Sacramento is the home of perhaps the finest railroad museum in America, the California State Railroad Museum. Sacramento is only 2 hours away, so I travelled up to visit (via Amtrak, of course), and right there was a statue of Ted Judah, a recreation of Huntingdon and Hopkins' general store, and the Central Pacific's first locomotive, Governor Stanford. Coming back home, my wife and I went up to Tilden to take a ride on the Redwood Valley. The ride's about 12 minutes, covering about 1.25 miles, and costs $2. We loved it.

I went back up a few days later and chatted with some of the crew up there. Most of them are volunteers, and I told them I was interested in getting involved. I got a tour of the roundhouse and the machine shop from Ray, who's been there a long time. He spent 14 years building the road's latest locomotive. I also met Ellen, whose dad founded the Redwood Valley in 1952, and who keeps things going at the road.

So now I'm a volunteer. I'll be keeping a log of my experiences at the RVRy, workin' on the railroad.