(The following story by John Foyston appeared on The Oregonian website on December 7.)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland’s giant steam engine, Southern Pacific 4449, is in fine fettle for the Holiday Express weekend excursions, but it was a close-run thing: Just weeks ago, it was jacked up — all 235 tons of it — as volunteers made and installed two new main bearings.
The bearings are 350-pound horseshoe-shaped blocks of brass and white metal in which the 13-inch-diameter driver axles spin. There are eight, two for each of four axles, and most have been fine for decades. But oil is critical to plain bearings such as these, and the manufacturer apparently changed the formula of the lube oil used for years. During a rail excursion last May, the main-driver axle bearings began overheating and 4449 had to limp slowly home.
“That’s the worst,” said Doyle McCormack, 4449’s engineer, “When something happens like that out in front of God and everybody.” McCormack oversaw the locomotive’s rebirth in the mid-1970s when it was rebuilt to pull the Freedom Train for the U.S. Bicentennial. He has looked after it ever since and is by any measure a doting parent, so this problem was going to be fixed.
“We dropped that axle as far as we could and then had to jack the locomotive up 16 inches to get the bearing blocks out,” he said. “When you have something that big in the air — well, let’s just say that my stress level was elevated.”
It was about to become more so: “We’d just gotten it up on jack stands,” said Pat Tracy, who rides in the left-hand seat of the cab as fireman, “and a couple days later they had a minor earthquake down the valley. I think we were all sweating a bit.”
Earlier this week at the Brooklyn roundhouse, 4449 was back on its wheels. Tracy and other volunteers checked it over prior to filling its boiler with hot water from a booster car and lighting the fire in its steel belly. The orange-and-black art deco streamliner is considered one of the world’s most beautiful locomotives, and even festoons of Christmas lights couldn’t dent its massive dignity.
Christmas lights because the locomotive that once pulled passenger trains at 70 and 80 mph will trundle between OMSI and Oaks Park pulling Portland families to raise money for the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation’s hoped-for new home and museum near OMSI.
But back in June, the locomotive was a long way away from steaming anywhere. Jacking it up was just part of the job. First, the half-ton connecting rods had to be eased off the drivers using chain hoists and a lift truck. Then the offending axle was dropped from the frame.
Once 4449 was in the air, the bearings were removed, patterns made and a Salem foundry cast the blocks in brass. Then the castings were machined and the crew poured molten bearing material called babbitt (yes, that’s where Sinclair Lewis got the name for his novel) into the saddles, which were then bored to size on a milling machine about the size of a small bungalow. Oh, and they refurbished the pivot pins and springs in the locomotive’s front pilot truck of four smaller wheels, too.
To call it a major repair is a major understatement. Back in the heyday of steam, when the Brooklyn Roundhouse teemed with dozens of mechanics and fitters, they never would have attempted it.
“They did running maintenance in the roundhouse,” said McCormack, “they topped up oil and water, lubed bearings and checked for problems. This job would’ve been sent to a back shop as a major overhaul.”
But McCormack says he and his volunteers aren’t heroes: “When something like this happens, you fix it. You do what you have to do.”
Thanks to a new $15-a-gallon oil formulated just for steam locomotives, McCormack hopes the job is done. “I didn’t have any spare bearing blocks cast, because they cost $3,000 each — and because I hope I never see this part again.”