did you ever figure out how to fix the 4449?
This is a true story of how I fixed the 4449. It was back in 1976 when it was making its tour of this country pulling the American Freedom Train. I had a chance to photograph the train as it made its way from Sioux City to Des Moines on the Milwaukee Road. It had been inspected in Sioux City and when they got to Des Moines, the inspector told the engineer, Doyle McCormic that the flanges on the front driver were worn thinner than the 15/16" allowed by the safety standards. He would permit the engine to be towed to Omaha, but it could go no further. As it turns out, the American Freedom Train was parked in West Des Moines about a block from a machine shop that I used to make parts. Back in those days, I was a machine tool designer. Doyle wandered into the machine shop hoping to find someone that could make a cutting tool to re-machine the tires on 4449. The machinist recommended that he contact me. Later that week, Doyle and I met and discussed how fixing this problem was done in the old days. The solution was called a "ledger box" - a device that would replace the brake shoe for the driver being fixed. In this ledger box would be a cutting tool that would machine the tire as the locomotive was slowly run back and forth on a stretch of track.
Being a big steam fan, I jumped at the opportunity. We could find no drawings or references from the past other than stories told by old steam engineers. So, I put on my thinking cap and designed a new ledger box. I had it build by a machine shop in Pella, Iowa because they could get it built in a week. The following week, I took it to Omaha where Doyle had made arrangements with the Union Pacific to use a stretch of a little used siding. We got under way and before 10am had it installed and had made our first attempt at machining on the fly so to speak. Well, 4449 did not have enough speed control at the slow speed we needed, so we brought in a wench truck. The plan was to used the wench to pull 4449 backwards at a controlled rate of speed. It didn't work. The cable broke on our first attempt.
After that Doyle disappeared but turned up about an hour later. He had visited with Union Pacific officials and they agreed to loan us a switcher and engineer. This did the trick! That diesel electric had the control and power we needed at slow speeds. It took the rest of the week to get the first set of drivers machined. They started out as 80" drivers but were now 78" in diameter. The learning curve was steep, but learn we did. We finished the remaining 3 driver sets in 6 days and were ready to double head out of Omaha with the Union Pacific's 8444 that Sunday morning.
I have a steel shaving that came from the second left driver. It is a nice shade of blue, uniquely curled and makes a nice scupture.
I just couldn't resist telling this story given Gary's question.
David
People really need to be better about fixing misspelled lines of Text in Configs and having Textures be Even-Pixeled and whatnot BEFORE RELEASING THE ASSET.