This week at Knotts.

Alright all you followers of my posts it's time again for another "This week at Knott's".

Well its still Summer and we are still pretty busy, 41 has been the work horse most of this summer because 340 has been out of service for some needed boiler work.(More on that latter in this post.) Because we are still busy the EDNA is progressing slowly, but still progressing. As of last week she has two coats of Pullman green on the B end of the car. We will begin painting down one of the sides next week.(Sorry I don't have any pics of EDNA yet.)

We are also hosting a tour of our shop tomorrow and next week for members of the Orange empire Railway Museum. For those that are going Ill see you in the morning.(John Cole will I see you again?)

The Gondola is out of service right now. We recently discovered one of the axles was bent on one end. So last week we swapped the wheel set out with one of our(Not new but still good.) spare sets. Today we pulled the Gon around with 41 before the park opened to test the wheel set, and new bearings. It went well. With the car out of service we are also going to repair and re-stain the bench seats and preform some additional maintenance. While the gondola is out we are running four green coaches the stock car and the caboose.

Here is a pic of 41 backing the gondola back to the shop. I love doing switching.


Getting back to 340's boiler work. She is out of service for new tubes. This week we had a professional boiler company start removing the tubes. As of today all the tubes should be out, they will be back next week to start cleaning up the tube sheets, and installing the new tubes. This down time also allows us to preform some other less glamorous tasks. Like cleaning the inside of the tender and steam cleaning the underside of the locomotive.

Here are some pics of the tube removal.
Cutting the tubes.


Pulling the tubes out.You can see the removed tubes piled on the shop floor on the left side.


You can see the upper 75% of the tubes removed at 1:00pm today.


And for those who may have been wondering, or forgot about them, one of old Betsy's side dump ore cars is done. It was put back behind old Betsy more than a week ago. It looks pretty good it even has square nuts. It will look better as mother nature improves the color of the wood.