Steam & Excursion > Willamette Rear End

The rear is mostly completed. Plumbing of the water tank and oil tank will follow soon...

What do you all of think so far? =D

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Brian,

The only thing that offsets the pain and anguish I feel for being so close, yet unable to come up and help, is the joy I get from seeing you and everyone else doing such an incredible job with this restoration. It just goes to show that it really doesn't take that much time if you've got the money, brains, skill, and equipment all synchronized to the same tune. Mr. Wise and crew (yourself included) should be extremely proud of yourselves. KEEP GOING!

Adam,

Thank you for your extremely kind words. Hopefully you'll be able to come up and see her run! If you live near by and have weekends, I don't mind carpooling up to the RR. As we always say, the more hands, the better!

I forgot when the project started but the official disassembly date was January 12th, 2008... a very, very, cold, wet, day!

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Caption for the two guys in the photo.....

"Man! What have we gotten ourselves into? We said we could do what?...in how long?"

:P

AdamPhillips Wrote:
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> Caption for the two guys in the photo.....
>
> "Man! What have we gotten ourselves into? We said
> we could do what?...in how long?"
>
> :P

That was pretty close to the sediment on that day...the rain simply just would not ease at all. I think the more we dug into it, the more we were like "this will never happen the way we wanted it to" but so far, despite a few teething issues, all is well =D

I'll have to upload the gallery to my smugmug account sometime. It was something else when the real heavy rains came around.

She looks brand new, Brian, and IS for all the work you folks have done. I sure intend to get up there this fall.

Very impressive work Brian...you MRSRR guys rock!

We'll soon be able to change the thread name to focus on the major component of the Willamette's front end, the boiler.

As I write this the crew at the Mineral shop is anxiously awaiting its arrival from Seattle and there is a boom truck standing by to unload it. Plans are to set it on the ground for tonight and place it on #2's frame tomorrow. I'm assigned to run engine 481 tomorrow and will get pictures of #2 but I'm sure that Brian or others will have an opportunity to post here before I can get back to my computer. With only five weeks to go until its debut the race is now on to get the locomotive reassembled.