Re: Keeping steam railroads alive.

All,

I know I'm kind of late to the party here, but a hearty thanks for a wonderful, frank, down-to-earth discussion . I'm a bit of a late bloomer in the steam locomotive genre. My burgeoning interest pleasantly caught me off-guard about 7 years ago. Hmmmmm, that was my 40th b-day. Maybe it's an early mid-life crisis ?

I live in Los Angeles & have been helping out on the steam team at the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum (www.psrm.org) at Campo, CA (40 miles east of San Diego) for the last 5 years. We don't have any running steam and won't for while. I helped reassemble the 4-6-0 #2353 and put it on display. It ran from mid-1990's till 2000ish before being sidelined with boiler problems. We've been disassembling the Coos Bay #11 (2-8-2T Mikado) for the last 2 years (1 weekend/month, so goes pretty slowly) and am planning on ultrasounding the boiler probably this summer. We had Dave Griner come out last summer to evaluate both engines with an eye towards restoration/repair. Geez, Wow ! talk about an wonderful overflow of information ! Dave's a walking encyclopedia, think he's got boiler water in his veins and breaths steam ??

I've gotten down and dirty with these engines and have to agree 1000% with other comments here, that the best way to learn about these magnificent ladies is to spend some quality time with them. Nothing like getting black from spending the day in the fire/smokebox cutting out boiler tubes ! It's some backbreaking work and even after tripling my volunteer pay, I'm still coming back for more ! A few years ago, I was driving home shaking my head in wonder at the unique work I was doing that day. I was thinking there's only a handful of folks doing this nowadays when this used to be everyday work !

I also just finished my machinist certificate of competence. Now I have paperwork to show how competent I am not. I'd like to build a model live steamer (possibly 1-1/2", maybe Gene Allen's loco's) and am working on small models to build up to a larger one. Now I'm thinking of taking a welding class. As others pointed out, where else can somebody learn these skills nowadays.

I spent my days banging out code in front of a computer. That's NO way to live !! I'd love to spend some time at D&S, Chama, CSRRM, Strasburg, etc. learning as much as I can !!

Mike