Engineer’s Journal – April 29 & 30, 2005

Friday, April 29 and Saturday, April 30 – I’m tying these two dates together because of the kind of “day” we had. The Suburban’s developed a bad miss so I decided it give it a tuneup in the hotel parking lot this morning. It’s running a lot better but has a really rough idle. I’ll have to check on this later. We headed to the train and arrived about 20 minutes before our scheduled departure time.

All the rods were back in place and Mike and Levi had the locomotive all greased up and Keith had everything else checked out and ready to go. I did the daily inspection, we did the air brake test, our pilots for both KCS and CN/IC were on board and we pulled about ¼ mile onto the main. Jerry Brown was our CN/IC pilot for the day.

Keith spotted problems in the rod immediately and we checked and found that it was already excessively hot. We backed into the office car track from which we had come and worked on it some. The next time we pulled onto the main, the temperature was elevated but nothing like the previous time. We backed a considerable distance to the IC yard and checked the rod pin temperature before we headed out and everything was looking great. We ran about 8 miles down the line and the rod was again getting hot. We pumped grease into it and it cooled down and we headed south. We elected to go into the siding at Terry to check on the rod. It was still getting excessively hot, so we pulled to the depot to work on it. Unknown to us, a large crowd was gathered at the depot just to watch us roll by. Instead, they got to watch us work on the engine for over 4 hours.