The Minnesota Transportation Museum Steam Team is working to reassemble the Northern Pacific class Q3 Pacific No. 2156 for display. This locomotive was part of an order of 23 locomotives built by Baldwin in 1909. We are currently rebuilding the engine truck and have run into an unexpected snag. One of the cast iron engine truck boxes is cracked and no longer repairable. We have drawings for the original engine truck boxes, however, we have found that the truck boxes actually on the locomotive are from a class Q4 Pacific, No. 2211. The Q4's were heavier locomotives than the Q3's and were purchased in two groups. The first group, No.s 2177-2207 were built by Baldwin in 1909-1910 while the second group, No.s 2208-2224, built by ALCO in 1910. We are in serious need of drawings for the engine truck for both the Q3 Baldwin locomotive AND the Q4 ALCO product. We especially need the Q4 journal box drawings as we need to construct a new box. If anyone can point us to a source for these drawings we will be most appreciative!

If it's for display only, can't you reverse engineer it?

Idle curiosity: does this mean, then, that MTM has given up on the idea of ever running steam again? I had heard that of the three locomotives on site, it was believed that 2156 was the best (and possibly only) candidate for restoration. Has this changed? Inquiring minds want to know.

Have you tried the NPRHA guys in the office at JSRH?

They have the NP pattern drawing files.

-Hudson

From a restoration to operation standpoint, the most significant issue with the 2156 is the internal steam passages that were broken when water got into the cylinder casting and froze while the locomotive was on display at the zoo. It was this discovery that halted the restoration effort years ago. To complicate matters further, it has been so long since the locomotive was disassembled that nobody has any idea of where the broken pieces of the cylinder casting are. The broken steam passage is what stopped the restoration years ago because of the cost of repair. Think SP 786 in Texas.

At this point, the MTM needs something that looks like a presentably complete locomotive. NP 2153 is complete, but is a pretty sad sight. NP 328 is mostly disassembled and not presentable, either. NP2156 has been off its wheels in Bay C of the roundhouse for 15 years and the plans for the roundhouse require that the locomotive be moved to Bay B where it is planned to display all three steamers. Thus the work on the engine truck.

We have been in close communication with NPRHS and no, there are no drawings in their collection that are applicable. There ARE drawing archives in Washington State that have not been cataloged, and we believe there is also an archive of drawings from the NP Brainerd shop, but we have had no luck in locating it. We have come to RYPN in hopes that someone has a private collection of NP drawings that we have not heard about.

Question? I won't pretend to know much about that type of locomotive, but Isn't the cylinder assembly removeable from the frame? Is the 2153's cylinder assy also similarly damaged?
I know that steam locos were not exactly built on a production line, but two of the same type, from the same batch, built for the same railroad, should be somewhat intechangeable.....So, why not swap them? After all the railroads shop probably would have...

If we had the shop and the skilled labor that the NP had back in the day, we could contemplate the possibility. Today it is a matter of resources, monetary and physical. Besides, the two locomotives are not interchangeable. The Q3's as built had steam delivery passages internal to the cylinder castings, very common in 1909. In the 2156, it is one of these passages that was damaged. The 2153 got new cylinder castings in the 1940's converting the steam delivery from internal to external, which was more common by then. We have no idea of what other changes were involved with such a change. So no, a cylinder casting swap is not in our future.

OK if I read correctly she went from internal core / outside admission to external steam pipe / inside admission......perhaps with a change from Stephenson to Walschaert or addition of superheaters? It's very interesting to see how railroads modernized existing fleets.......
which doesn't mean you can't simply design a new fabricated cylinder set and saddle, based on the dimensions you can measure in your old broken castings.

Not that you absolutely need to make this one run. Or any other, particularly....just it isn't a lost cause by any means.

You can probably patch together the bad pilot truck parts or fabricate some sort of carrier with a wooden or babbit lined bearing to shove her into the display area. Assembly lube would hold her that far.

dave

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29475&p=141769&hilit=baldwin+archive#p141769

Pn State Archives.

If we had a cubic meter of $100 bills, this discussion wouldn't matter. But we don't, so we are stuck. As I said in an earlier post we are not interested in going down the road that the Austin Steam Train took.

I'll lead you a start

http://research.nprha.org/Steam%20Diagr ... aspx?ID=66

Q3

http://research.nprha.org/Steam%20Diagr ... aspx?ID=68

Q4

but I don't think these are the detailed drawings you need but leads a start.

I'll keep poking around.

Probably if you contacted the above Pennsylvania Archives maybe they can thumb around and find something. A friend was looking for North Shore 4 truck loco drawings and I found an Oregon group access to the Oregon Electric stuff and they found drawings on it much to our delight and amazement, now this friend has built several models of the loco.

keep plunking, and the rule goes by Vane Jones... SCROUNGE RULE.

The Baldwin materials in the Pennsylvania Archives have not yet been cataloged. They exist in boxes and bins and consist of a mixed bag of mostly late steam-early diesel era drawings. I spent a day a couple of years ago going through some of the materials, and finding something like the cylinder half-saddle drawings for a particular class of locomotive is highly unlikely. As I understand it, the drawings at Harrisburg were the last of the Baldwin drawings, which were inherited by the Austin-Western Company, maker of construction equipment and final successor to Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton. When they went out of business, they donated the materials to the state.

If you can come up with a Baldwin specification card for the locomotive class in question, you might have abetter chance at the DeGolyer Library in Texas.

There is software and technologies today that can do that but takes some skill.

poking around there are 4 NP 4-6-2's preserved, check if they have the original or swapped trucks.

NP may have swapped in the newer one, perhaps a better design.

Look for some Locomotive Cyclopedias, I just found one at my local hobby shop 1938, nope not in there. These came out yearly full of info, thick book.

If you look at the records the NP did a lot of experimentation with the Q3 and Q4 Pacifics, They had several different cylinder sizes for one thing.

The Q3 2156 has the cylinders from a Q4, there is some evidence that the engine was damaged, and had it's cylinders replaced, this would also explain the Q4 front truck.

Apparently there was a problem with the exhaust passages as there are several Q3/Q4 engines converted to outside exhaust. When the broken passage was discovered years ago, there were a couple of proposals made that looked like they would be workable conversions to outside exhaust.

I could go on and on about the story of MTM and steam, as I was there at the beginning, but the main thing is the organization is stable, they are going to stuff and mount the engines INSIDE, and hopefully steam is in the future.

I will make the comment that I think they should leave one of the engines partly dissembled as part of the display.

-Hudson

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