The discussion a few days ago about sending Strasburg's 475 to Roanoke and not returning it made me think of the reverse side of preservation and operation. Has there ever been a preserved locomotive or any equipment really that was restored to operation and found to be an absolute pain in the rear to operate or maintain? I can see 475 being one of them with the tiny cab and odd placement of things but are there any others?

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Sooooo........ it was your favorite engine to work with?

I take it none of this was know when she first came to Strasburg, and she was chosen because of her last rebuild, historic PRR configuration, and age compatibility with the D16sb?

When "converting" a PRR MP-54 commuter car to tourist coach service, pay attention to mechanical things before you get out the cutting torch. Well meaning folks "cleaned off" all the unwanted and unneeded parts such as pantographs, compressors, batteries, and all things heavy underneath. This resulted in a very nice looking and functional tourist coach, but it then rode 6" too high due to the weight loss. Fun to couple to and operate in a passenger train, but doable. We never got around to trying to adjust the springs in the trucks.

Not to mention, they make for very sea sick passengers, if they are susceptible to such things.

W&W all of the above issues with their MP's after doing the same thing as you say, Mark.

Just think of the poor guys who had to make a living firing and working on the likes of 7002!

Whew! Reading Mr. Anderson's commentary on the 7002 reminds me that much of the attention to detail in design work for later steam, particularly Super Power, was to make a lot of those jobs, like fire cleaning, easier.

A British view of locomotive running maintenance; although from across the Atlantic, I would bet a great deal of this looks very familiar to anybody from Strasburg, Orbisonia, Chama, or anywhere else that runs steam:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nanjOerogjU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57AOg4JrJB4

Some things that could go wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0bToe9DKFo

A bit more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SEicpqd ... ure=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xzP-HtGGxg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO_XYxi7EUM

Mr. Anderson's comments about the difficulty of cleaning the fire, in particular working around the ashpan, make me wonder if the Pennsy itself either wasn't very good at making sure its employees could work efficiently (a definite possibility, given that 7002 would have been built before much attention was paid to such things), or whether Pennsy shops had some special gear--say, a handle with an offset in it to go on that ashpan lever, to keep from banging up the engine's paint and your fingers (in that order of importance).

The location of reverse lever and air not being ideal might--might--be forgivable on the basis that this locomotive was and is a true express engine, a thoroughbred, and it wasn't meant to be run tender-first half the time. The bit about lubricating the valve gear is a big chunk of why outside valve gears were invented. Humming Coles pops, a firedoor not located at ideal height from the deck, and that horrible access to the throttle can best be summed up as examples of "man's inhumanity to man," as a British writer wryly commented on this same subject of locomotive maintenance and running in Britain.

At that, we must wonder what it was like to work on a lot of British engines, perhaps most of them. Inside valve gear, inside cylinders (some of those in the most inaccessible places to put them), plate frames, smaller cabs because of the smaller loading gauge, cabs with no seats at all, and reports of things like firedoors (Great Western I think) that had not only the firedoor, but a heavy flap-like plate to be lifted up and down with every shovel of coal. And those buffer and link couplings (shared with continental systems), with men going between cars daily for, what, going on 200 years now?

About the only advantage they might have had would be a lack of equalizing levers to take care of; the Brits attempted to address adhesion with a lot of attention to weight distribution rather than use an equalizing system on locomotives. It helped that track was often better than ours (and the track in those video clips is excellent).

One must also wonder how 1223 compared, especially as she was built for the same road, and not too much earlier. The same could be asked of the other Pennsy steamers in the museum, if anything looks different (or is likely the same) on that power.

I think it is a fairly wide known and accepted fact that designers at Altoona just didn't loose a lot of sleep worrying about the guys that had to run and fix their locomotives.

I will say that the period from about 1890 to 1910 or so seemed to produce more hard to work on power than than before or after. Seems that sized increased, but not convenience. Cooke complicated things by sticking to Wagon top boilers (as opposed to extended wagontop) with the dome and throttle over the firebox later than others, and their running gears suffered from what Stephenson referred to as "too much ingenuity".

During a trip to Italy earlier in the year, I got to see for the first time what it takes to couple and uncouple those buffer and link couplings. Suffice to say the thought of having to do that multiple times a day made me very nervous...

Thanks. Y'all just gave some Very Good Reasons not to acquire an EMU commuter car motor and hack things off to make it a trailer. Which unfortunately happens often enough to be a cliche.

These guys get torch happy and also hack off the EMU control stands, brake stand, internal lighting, headlight, clapper gong/bell and horn... and then to add insult to irony... they run push/pull. So there's some guy in the vestibule with a backup hose and a radio, when he could have been standing 3 feet to the right blowing a REAL horn and operating a REAL brake stand from a fully functional control cab.

Whoa, a B-25 Mitchell just overflew my house.

The thing about those "fully functional control stands" on old MU cars is that my understanding of them is that the FRA regards (or at least used to regard) them as "locomotives" for operating purposes, meaning they have to have up-to-date blue cards. So, "neutering" them may make sense from an operational standpoint. Maybe keeping one or two as "control" cars, with parts of the old control equipment still in place is a good idea, I don't know what is involved in getting them into compliance.

Good point! We have a couple of ex-METRA M.U. "Highliners" which supposedly need to be "blue-carded" thus preventing their usage as straight trailers on diesel-hauled passenger runs. I am wondering if the simple removal of the pantagraph would get these "de-classified" from being locomotives. I have heard conflicting opinions. Does anyone know the FRA policy for SURE?

Thanks.

Les

I don't know the exact model, but GE had a locomotive that had some odd cab stairs. Somehow I (and many others) would end up hitting the front of my knee on the steps. Very strange. Didn't help that these engines had small doors and tiny walkways.

Also, the nose doors on old wide body engines were about 5' 10", so all of us over 6' ended up with awful headaches the first time we tried to get out of the engine.

You should see some watertight doors then, Army LT tugs, they were no more then 4.5'!