A new roof every 100 years

New floor for the 276 installed in 1998

Coach 276 is unremarkable yet at the same time it is remarkable.  Built in 1915 by the Barney and Smith Car Company, it has carried hundreds of thousands of people, primarily between Spokane and Vancouver/Portland, but also to Seaside and Bend, Oregon. Among the first all-steel coaches,Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway coach 276 remained in passenger train service until the beginning of Amtrak in 1971. Soon after, it was acquired by the Northwest Railway Museum and has been carrying passengers between Snoqualmie Falls and North Bend ever since.

Years of use has required past collections efforts including new upholstery and flooring.  Yet it was difficult to address roof rehabilitation before completion of the Conservation and Restoration Center. Now the Museum is able to apply roof panels "like it was a new car."

SkilFab is a sheet metal company located in Snoqualmie and they have extensive tooling for the cutting, forming and shaping of sheet metal.  The 14 gauge panels from the 276 were an easy match for their modern equipment, though the shaping process was somewhat tedious. 

SkilFab workers form the

roof panel.  Watch the

attached video clip to

see how it works!

The original roof panels were (probably) made on a large press using a die, which was an uneconomical option for a single coach roof.  At SkilFab, a sheet metal brake fitted with a round die was used to "bump" the heavy sheets into the correct profile.  The profile was cut into a  piece of sheet metal that was used to check the profile throughout the manufacturing process.  Workers stopped after every few "bumps" to check and made corrections as needed.  Upon delivery to the Museum, the back sides of the panels were coated with zinc primer and the panels were test fitted. Once there was a good fit, each panel was fastened into position with cold rivets.

The first new roof panel is completed!

The first panel is test-fitted to allow

corrections.

The new panels are very similar to the originals but there are some important differences.  First of all, the original roof used two separate pieces to clad between the bottom of the lower clerestory and the outer edge of the upper clerestory.  The new roof panels are a single piece and are modified from the original profile so that there is no flat area on the top of the lower roof for water to pool. They will also be attached to the car using a different system. The original roof panels used a standing seam.  The new panels will be plug welded and the seams will overlap.  This will be easier to install and there will no longer be a standing seam to leak.

Gary James is leading the project. 

Volunteer Arnie L. is playing a big

role too, as are other Museum

volunteers.

The Museum's Gary James has been leading the effort inside the Conservation and Restoration Center.  Gary is a shipwright and his skill set is perfect for the project. He has been performing much of the day-to-day work, and is providing direction for volunteers who have offered to participate. 

Before permanent installation began, the steel carlines were treated with rust converter, primed with zinc, and the ceiling cavity was insulated.  A new "Z" channel was installed on the top edge of the car side and is used to capture the bottom lip on the roof panel.  The installation is expected to take two weeks and will help prepare coach 276 for its second Century of service!

Smoke or heat?

A critical responsibility of every museum is the general protection of the Collection.  Broadly defined, that could mean protecting it from everything, which is unrealistic.   However, prudent steps can be taken to protect the collection from things that could reasonably occur.  Examples may include exposure to bright sunlight, rapid changes in heat or humidity, small to moderate earthquakes, and fire. 

An articulated lift allows a fire alarm

technician to exchange fire detection

sensors inside the Train Shed, high above

chapel car Messenger of Peace.

Inside the Northwest Railway Museum's new Train Shed exhibit building, some of the most important and representative objects in the Collection are protected with UV-filtering windows, R-30  insulation, a structure designed to the most modern seismic code, and a fire detection and suppression system.  Yet no system is perfect and unfortunately the Museum has had a variety of issues with the fire detection system. 

Local codes required smoke detectors in the original construction because, as Spike has been advised, they often detect a fire sooner than a heat sensor.  However, in a building with fans running all the time and nearly 750,000 cubic feet of air, there have been problems with these sensors.  Since completion in 2010, the Train Shed has experienced as many as 50 false alarms.  Fortunately, the Snoqualmie Fire Department has been very understanding and supportive, and several fire fighters now know almost as much about the Collection as some of the regular docents.  However a problem like this cannot be allowed to continue. Aside from the story about The Boy Who Cried Wolf, what if the fire department is responding to a false alarm when your house is on fire?

The Museum and its contractor partners have worked hard to determine the cause of the false alarms from the smoke detectors.  The Train Shed is not particularly dusty - in fact a lot cleaner than the Conservation and Restoration Center, which also has a number of smoke detectors.  There are no sudden changes in temperature that could cause condensation to form inside the detectors. The model of sensor does not have a history of issues.  There has even been consideration as to whether an infestation of insects or spiders is causing the problem. However, without being able to pinpoint an exact cause, it has been determined that smoke detectors are not reliable inside the Train Shed, and the local municipality approved a change. 

Early in August 2013, E Squared Systems was on site to replace the smoke detectors with heat sensors. This is quite a feat in a structure filled with artifacts, with ceilings as high as 35 feet, and not a lot of floor space to operate a 14,000-pound lift.  Now the Museum looks forward to improved reliability, and the Snoqualmie Fire Department looks forward to fewer late night museum visits.

Something old, something new

6 wheel wood, steel reinforced

passenger truck

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something . . . carbon black!

Later this month inside the Conservation and Restoration Center, the chapel car 5 Messenger of Peace will be married to its new trucks, which are special frames with wheels, bearings, and brakes.  The trucks (we think, based on castings and other details) date from circa 1901 and will get some new parts, are in a sense borrowed, and will be carbon black.  So how appropriate to now look at the origins of those trucks and how they compare to the originals.

Messenger of Peace was built by Barney and Smith of Dayton, Ohio in 1898.  The car was one of the longest cars built to that date and incorporated all the latest design advances.  It included 6 wheel trucks reinforced with steel flatbars on either side of the oak frame members.  Sadly, those original trucks were (we believe) scrapped in 1948 when the car was repurposed as a roadside diner.

The Museum has several railroad cars it has been holding to provide parts for others.  While most were originally acquired for the Collection, they were later removed either because they were redundant or because they were in very poor condition. They provide couplers, brakes, hardware, and even wood moldings to make objects in the Collection more complete.

Imhoff Crane lifts the X-127 while the

Museum's Pettibone exchanged the

trucks.

 A late nineteenth Century car called the X-127 was one such car.  It was outfitted with trucks of the same design that the chapel car was built with and they are in great shape.  They received some structural upgrades circa 1927, but are visually nearly identical to the originals.  Earlier this month, Snoqualmie’s own Imhoff Crane set up at the CRC and made quick work of the truck exchange.  They lifted the car one end at a time and replaced the original trucks with a set of shop trucks the Museum uses to move projects around.

So something old (the chapel car), something new (new center plates), something borrowed and something carbon black (black trucks from another car) will be in the marriage of chapel car 5 and its trucks.  Later, Spike will post some marriage photos along with the circa 1902 photo taken at Novinger, MO that has been used to rehabilitate the car.

Perhaps only to a curator's eye, this is a classic wood-era

passenger car truck

Steel erection begins!

The Train Shed is now beginning to take shape. On Tuesday, December 22, 2009 subcontractor CHG Building Systems began erecting steel columns for the Train Shed. CHG is not a newcomer to the Museum – they were also involved in construction of the Museum’s Conservation and Restoration Center in 2005 and performed work on that project to a high standard. For this repeat performance, CHG is using a crane, telescoping lifts and of course a highly skilled team of erectors, and the building is beginning to take shape.

The Train Shed will be a fully enclosed and semi conditioned exhibit building for the Northwest Railway Museum’s collection of railway transportation artifacts including locomotives, coaches and freight cars. Priority exhibits will include the most vulnerable objects – typically the oldest and those built predominantly of wood – and will include the 1898-built Chapel Car 5 Messenger of Peace, White River Lumber Co caboose 001, and Northern Pacific Railway steam locomotive 924.

Construction began in July 2009 and substantial completion of the steel structure is anticipated in March 2010. Track construction will begin after the building is completed; project will be dedicated in August 2010. This nearly $4 million project has been in development for five years.

Major funders include the Washington State Historical Society’s Capital Projects for Washington’s Heritage, McEachern Charitable Trust, 4Culture, The Seattle Foundation, TEA-21 Transportation Enhancements, Puget Sound Energy Foundation, Nysether Family Foundation, Osberg Family Foundation, Washington Department of Commerce, Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving, and hundreds of individuals. Additional support is requested and can be made through the Museum’s web site here or on the American Express Giving Express site here.

Good conductor, bad conductor

Weyerhaeuser Timber Company White River Branch #1 is a diesel-electric locomotive built in 1951 during the transition from steam to diesel. It is an important object in the Museum’s collection for the era in which it was built, because it represents local King County history (Enumclaw area), because of its connection with the forest industry, because of its builder (Fairbanks Morse) and because it worked together with White River Lumber caboose 001 that is also in the Museum’s collection. And, well, just because (yes, Spike disliked that reason too!)

Diesel-electric refers to the power transmission. A diesel engine turns an electric generator and relays control how much electricity is sent to electric traction motors that are mounted on each axle. It is a very efficient design and similar to the concept used in hybrid cars, except there is no storage battery.

Locomotive 1 is operationally complete and for nearly 20 years regularly pulled trains on the interpretive railway. Unfortunately, electrical problems developed a few years ago and the locomotive has been out of service ever since. Unfortunately, electrical problems concomitant with managing old locomotives because wires and components that are nearly 60 years old tend to be bad electrical conductors when they should be good, and good electrical conductors when they should be insulators. (In this context, conductor is not the boss of the train, it refers to the electrical properties of something. If something is a good conductor, electricity will probably flow easily through it.)

Locomotive 1 is slated to go on long term exhibit in the new Train Shed when that structure is completed later next year. In preparing for that exhibit, the Museum’s staff has been attempting to address known issues including stuck fuel injectors (Fairbanks Morse Engine sent out a crew to fix this problem) and electrical problems. For the 1, electrical problems appear to be confined to two traction motors that have an unusual buildup of carbon dust. In that situation, we would call that carbon a very bad good conductor: it allows the high voltage intended to power the electric traction motor to leak into areas where it is not supposed to. If an attempt were made to operate those electric motors, the result would be a very bright flash and a lot of molten copper, and that would almost certainly make future operation unlikely.

Over the past several months, various cleaning techniques have been applied to the locomotive 1’s traction motors. It is too soon to tell if the locomotive will be able to operate with any regularity, but some of the results are promising enough that a new set of carbon brushes – an essential component in a direct current traction motor – has been installed.

We have a lot more information to share about locomotive 1 – and even an exciting announcement or two – so watch for more posts in the coming weeks and months.

Happy Birthday, Washington State

Why be modest? We’ll take credit for Washington State’s 120th birthday.

Washington became the 42nd state when President Benjamin Harrison signed a proclamation on November 11, 1889. It’s not coincidental that D. H. Gilman was signing Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway Company stock certificates (shown here) in 1888, or that investors were planning the town of Snoqualmie in 1889, or that the Snoqualmie Depot was built in 1890. Railroads were crucial to Washington Territory’s development and statehood.

Before railroads, you got here by wagon or ship. The first trains began operating in Washington Territory in the 1870s. In 1883, a spike driven in Montana completed the second transcontinental railroad, this one reaching the Pacific Northwest. (The first connected the East Coast to California.) Washington State’s population surged to 357,232 by 1890, a five-fold increase in 10 years. (In case you’re wondering, we’re past 6 1/2 million now.) Seattle's population grew from 1,107 residents in 1870 to 3,533 in 1880 . . . to 42,837 in 1890. Trains, of course, didn’t only bring an influx of people. Trains carried goods and materials essential to the region’s growth and development.

The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern connected Snoqualmie to Seattle in 1889, the year Washington became a state. Does the Northwest Railway Museum have any artifacts from that era?

The Snoqualmie Depot, shown here around 1896, was built in 1890. About 150 feet of original track remain in front of the depot today. The final image shows original SLSE rail laid in 1889. This was the main track until about 1963. Rail behind the depot is also from the period. However it wasn’t laid here until 1999. It came from local logging lines.

Bridge 35 over Snoqualmie River’s South Fork provides a view of the most common bridge design of that period. The through-pin-connected Pratt truss bridge was built in 1891, although it spanned a river in Montana before being relocated to North Bend in 1923.

The Northern Pacific day coach 889 is considered the oldest railway car/large object in the Museum’s collection. It was purportedly built in 1881, though it could have been built a few years later. (We have no definitive research yet.) The Canadian Pacific 25 was built in 1881 but didn’t find its way west until the 1890s.

You can see a picture of a steam locomotive built in 1885 (not in our collection) on the Washington State Steam Railroads and Locomotives website.


Sources:
Secretary of State blog
Seattle History Examiner
History Link
Seattle Times
Encyclopedia of Western Railroad History: Oregon, Washington, by Donald B. Robertson