1 : 1 scale modeling

[e-paw]

Over the last two weeks our attention has been turned to DL&W 663. On the last excursion she suffered a compressor failure where it started to shake violently at high RPM's. This damaged the after-cooler and a water line that runs to the cab heater. The cab heater was a simple solder fix as it is just brass pipe, but the after cooler was a different story. To get to it the main air reservoir had to be removed first and then the after cooler was removed and repaired. All this work was performed by a different crew, It was our job to put it all back.

The reservoir was lowered into a pit equipped with a jacking piston at the bottom of it, this made it a lot safer and easier to do.    

663 was then spotted in position over the air tank.     The blue sign is incorrect,,,, we are all just big children.

The after-cooler was next installed into place and tightened down. It removes some of the heat from the compressed air so that any condensation settles in the reservoir and not in the brake lines.    

With that all finished the air tank was jacked into position and strapped in place.     This all sounds simple but it was a lot of hard, heavy work with plenty of potential for pinched fingers and bumped heads. The biggest problem that we had was that none of us were there to see the tank removed, and we didn't know what straps went where. All of the support straps are different sizes and only go in one way. After several best guesses we took the straps over to 664 and matched them up to what went where. Then amazingly it all dropped into place.