Yesterday (Sunday, November 17, 2013), Southern Railway No. 1200, as well as a prison guard tower from Angola, LA, were successfully lowered into the lower levels of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC). These are the first of many exhibits to be installed in the museum. Although skies were cloudy for the event, weather did not cause any delays in the operation. Everything generally went according to schedule and the passenger car was off the hooks of the two large cranes well before 2:00 PM EST.

There is still some work to get the car into final position, then the two artifacts will have enclosures built around them for protection during the remainder of the building construction.

Here are a few pictures from the Wasatch perspective:

Where do you get a hair dryer big enough to shrink all that plastic around the coach?

You use a bottle of propane and a weed burner/killer attachment. Have to keep the torch moving or you will melt a hole in the shrink wrap.

How heavy is that car? Those are two large cranes and they looked to be at max counterweight. Or are they just rigged to do long reach?

?

Did you notice the angle of the boom in the last pic?

The concrete color isn't right! How dare they!

Yes. And if the booms are still at full extension, then they are reaching pretty far. Since from one of the pics, they are threading the car between the two booms so they lifted it off of the truck on the opposite side of the cranes from the hole so i"m wondering why they are reaching so far. I'm guess they don't want the ground pressure that close to the walls until the building is finished.

It is certainly what we call a complex lift.

Complex move to say the least.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to all of you.

This was complex in many ways. The cranes had to be located more than 105 feet from the foundation wall. The water table in the area is only 8 feet deep, so we had to minimize the ground impact. The cranes are exerting less than 1800 pounds per square foot on the out riggers! That is an incredibly low number.

We were only allowed to put 300 psf on the foundation wall. Which at 100 feet away, we were able to maintain less than 250 psf on the wall.

The cranes are actually set on an angle. The cranes are sitting at 5 degrees against the move. In other words, the cranes are slanted backwards. The boom angle at the end of the move was less than 50 degrees. The cranes are required to go no more than 75% of max capacity. They were weighted with over 300,000 lbs of weights per crane and each crane was a 550 ton crane. The car body weighed in at 88,000 lbs with all of the under car items removed.

Once we had the car in the foundation, we had to crib it. They only allowed us 350 psf on the foundation slab. We used a ton of cribbing and blocks to get to 350 psf on the floor of the museum. We then had to move the car 45 feet south to the final resting place of the car. This move took us an additional five days and was finished just a few days ago.

In all, the crane aspect and rigging aspect of this job cost more than the actual restoration of the car. It took us well over 9 months to plan this move and get everybody to be happy with the engineering and the complexity of it all. In the end, the move went perfectly, on budget, on time and no accidents.

It was a lot of fun!

Kindly yours,

JohnE.

Came across some other material on the exhibit:

http://thestillroomblog.com/2013/12/17/ ... n-history/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-cult ... 85381.html

What most interesting about the first blog, was the pointing that 1401 can one day be removed if ever desired. And that is a good an interesting point.

Bob