Thanks but we had limited time. I really wanted to look around longer and take more photos but got there too late. Had other things going on.

Steve

I walked right past those doors. Next visit I would like to see the rest that I missed. Very nice "steam shop". I look at it as a machine shop but I see that only steamers get serviced there.

Steve

If you were to take a look at the other shops, they have a few machines but not much. As you said the steam shop really has all of the machines. The area behind the doors we actually call the machine shop.

That's an incomplete assessment. The steam department may have a big machine shop, but you missed the gigantic wood shop that is attached to Barn 4, the Electric Car Shop. The wood shop is larger than my house and has many lovingly restored and still servicible wood machines.

There's nothing like seeing a Berlin Sander in action, a drum sander so large, you can sand both sides of a house door at once.

Berlin Sander @ IRM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYMAyxTbAOY

Steve

Steam = Metal Machine Shop

Com-Ed 15 was modified shortly after it was built, to clear something (I've heard several stories about what the obstacle may have been) at one of the generating plants it worked at. It was last employed at Com-Ed's Byron nuclear plant.

Jeff

#3336 J.Neils Lumber Co. #5 was at Libby, Mt. for a short time then moved to there logging operations at Klickitat, Wa. Its sister engine #1643 #4 is being rebuilt at the Heritage Museum in Libby,Mt. New firetubes and front tubesheet. Also new douglas fir decking.

It's more like for many classes of machine, there is one vendor that is pretty much the gold standard. Lathe, Monarch. Mill, Bridgeport. Threader, Ridgid. Oscilloscope, HP. Auction site, eBay. Air brake, Westinghouse. Ketchup, Heinz. Welder, Lincoln. Search engine, Google. The old joke in mainframe computers was, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

So I wouldnt call it a great machine so much as the only one worth having. Sure you can get an Enco lathe, but you'd always doubt the machine when something went wrong, and that isn't fun.

The machine shop at Orange Empire is an attraction for some of our visitors, especially the older machinists who enjoy seeing all our "old school" non-computer controlled machines.

Hey, Robert, what about Standard Modern and Colchester? Maybe we have a tie for gold standard? LOL.

Many people would rank Niles up there, but the only Niles I have used (a huge old thing, about 6' swing in a gap bed X about 20') had some very serious safety issues resulting from poorly placed and designed controls. That, for me, puts Niles well down in the pack.

It's great seeing such well equipped shops in a museum.

Steve Hunter

CNC machines have their place.

That place is TechShop. I can't imagine a railroad museum without a TechShop (or equivalent) membership for the occasional work it can't do in-house.

But then, I also can't imagine a railroad museum without a reasonably well equipped machine shop. And yet many of them exist. They aren't doing well, but they exist. A museum in northwest Indiana tells me they don't have much in the way of machine tools because they don't have 3-phase power in their otherwise handsome shop.

There are quite a few museums with perfectly respectable shops. They just don't make a big deal about advertising it.

I love CNC equipment. I've programmed and machined parts from blocks of cast iron when original molds and castings were lost. You don't even want to waste the time on manual machines duplicating complex castings.

I have never seen a CNC machine in any railroad museum shop.

Why?

You can pick up older used CNC mills, lathes for almost the cost of moving them.

I don't have 3-phase in my garage.

I have 3-phase lathe, mill, surface grinder all running on a 3-hp phase converter. Converters aren't that expensive - I paid a little over $200 for mine.

Steve

Had no idea they {Union} had such a huge machine shop. Need to get there too for a visit. Unless you have the money and machinist who is familar with CNC, I can see why many RR museums do not have them. Most jobs are repair/rebuild and it just doesn't seem worth it to many older machinests. You could argue that one all day long though. I think for many shops, you cover as much as you can with your machines and manpower and farm the rest out? Having a climate controlled shop is another item, many shops do not have 24/7 heating and cooling. An old Niles will tolerate more temp/humidity changes than a sensitive CNC machine, I would think anyway?

I like what was said about phase convertors. I have a 20 HP phase convertor in my shop at home and can run all my machines at one time if I had too, though I have never run anymore than one machine and air compressor at one time {in real use}. A very inexpensive alternative to having to pay the power company big dollars to bring in 3 phase. But like many things if others have not heard of it or seen it with their own eyes they will not consider it a viable option. Getting people to change there thinking is one of the hardest things I know of. People would rather keep putting the squeeze on their own hand in a vise than to accept there might be a better or easier way.

Machinehead61 I like your questions and thoughts on shops and equipment.

Cheers, John.

I don't think phase converters are a secret. But they don't give you any more power than is already coming into the panel. When I spoke of 3-phase I really mean the increased power capacity that is implicit in 3-phase service. So that you can run larger tools such as the ones we are admiring at IRM etc. These tools were not particularly expensive since not everyone can use them and in many cases, tools of this size are deprecated by their CNC equivalents.