In the 20 years since the Railroaders Memorial Museum launched its effort to restore the Altoona-built K-4 steam locomotive 1361 to operating condition, officials have repeatedly predicted dates and costs for completion.

Those have all blown away like smoke on the mountain, and the locomotive – despite the expenditure of $3.8 million in government funding – remains in pieces.

Last week, asked for a project update, museum Board President Andy Mulhollen declined to make new predictions but insisted – despite past errors, supervisory dismissals, work that needed redone and talk about settling for a static display – the museum intends to get the big machine running again.

A “knowledgeable source,” who didn’t want to be named, said a small group of people “within the industry who have an interest in seeing the project completed” has forged an understanding with the museum giving the group management control of the planned restoration – although the museum remains the ultimate owner of the K-4.

That group offers hope for the project, given the intentions and capabilities of its members.

“I believe we have people lined up who are serious people and who will make the (financial) commitment, once they know what the commitment has to be,” said the source, who is peripherally involved with the group.

There are no plans to ask for any more government money, according to Mulhollen and the source.

“We think the public has been burnt with this (restoration),” the source said.

The group is aiming for redemption.

“If this can be done, it buries a lot of embarrassment,” the source said.

For the past two years, a small group of volunteers, all craft employees at the Juniata Locomotive Shop of Norfolk Southern, have been sustaining the project, working one night a week at most, according to Mulhollen and the group’s leader, pipefitter Mike Reindl.

The group has helped inventory and organize the parts, all of which are now under roof at the museum, and have been working at various tasks within their capabilities and the limits of the equipment and space at their disposal in the museum’s quarter-roundhouse and Memorial Hall.

“We’re plodding along,” Mulhollen said.

Under a ‘black cloud’

The group is determined to keep the project’s “spirit” alive, said Reindl, a 32-year-old, fifth-generation railroader whose grandfather – “my buddy” – taught him about steam engines with the help of books that Reindl read sitting on the older man’s lap.

The volunteers love the work, which continues despite the “negativity” that has surrounded the project for years, Reindl said.

The project may be under “a black cloud,” but it has included plenty of investment “in the right places” to produce critical components that now await reassembly, Reindl said.

Components have been refurbished or recreated by employees of the project at Steamtown in Scranton – in the early years of the restoration phase – or by subcontractors, and they’re stored in crates, on skids or on the floor, depending on their size.

The pieces include the drive wheels, tall as a man, installed on new axles and with new steel “tires” to ride the rails.

The parts include the “cross-compound air pump,” tucked away in its own box.

There are also the components of the staybolts designed to hold the inside and outside walls of the firebox together – and a specified distance apart – while providing seals that keep the critical cooling water that goes in between those walls.

The volunteers are doing good work, Mulhollen said.

Still, at some point, the project will need an infusion of money, certified specialists working by contract and a professional project manager, Reindl said.

Boiler key issue

The chief obstacle to the restoration has always been the boiler, because of the risk of catastrophic failure, due to the high pressure of the steam it produces.

Much work has been done over the years to the old boiler, which includes the firebox, barrel and smoke box, and it now meets the “middle-of-the-road” standards in place when the Pennsylvania Railroad workers built the K-4 in 1918, Reindl said.

But it doesn’t meet modern safety standards and lacks the necessary OK of the Federal Railroad Administration, which last ruled on it 10 or 11 years ago, disapproving repairs that had been made, according to FRA spokeswoman Desiree French.

Concerned about the boiler’s “old metallurgy” and the stresses it underwent in PRR service, the group that has taken an interest in the project hired a consultant to help determine whether it makes sense to order additional repairs or to commission construction of a new boiler.

The group would prefer a new boiler to minimize liability – especially liability for Norfolk Southern, whose lines could be a gateway to the rest of the state and its many short-line routes, so the K-4 could pull excursions for education and tourism, according to the source.

But those excursions can’t happen without the “cooperation and support” of Norfolk Southern.

The group would be willing to pay more for the new boiler, provided it’s not too much more, according to the source.

“We’re very conscious of the weight on the scales between liability and saving a few bucks,” the source said. “We know the existing boiler will never fully meet ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) requirements for (the K-4’s designed) working pressure.”

Those ASME standards are higher than FRA standards for locomotive boilers.

The operating pressure for the K-4 is 205 pounds per square inch, according to Mulhollen.

Even the current FRA standards require the boiler to be designed to withstand “multiples” of that operating pressure, according to Mulhollen.

In its current state, with no further repairs, the boiler could operate at 185 psi under FRA standards, according to Reindl.

That would allow the locomotive to run at 40 mph, which is the limit Norfolk Southern placed on steam engines operating on its lines previously, according to Reindl.

But Reindl figures that with the locomotive apart and under reconstruction, the museum shouldn’t settle for those limitations.

Likewise, the group doesn’t want to operate at 185 pounds, because that would be “a tacit admission that it’s not what it’s supposed to be” – an admission that could be detrimental in court, the source said.

The current boiler falls short of the current FRA standards in not having a thick-enough outer roof sheet for the firebox, Reindl said.

Replacing that under a certified boiler expert would allow the K-4 to run at 205 psi, Reindl said.

But the group wouldn’t necessarily be satisfied with that.

Boiler not original

It favors a new boiler, because the group members are looking “through the eyes of a risk manager for the railroad,” the source said.

The group also favors a new boiler despite the already-large investment in boiler repairs.

Between 60 and 70 percent of the boiler – as with the K-4 overall – is new material, Reindl estimated.

That includes the entire smoke box and the bottom “mud ring,” inner and outer “door sheets” and outer side sheets of the firebox, he said.

There have also been tests to verify the soundness of the barrel, he said.

All that doesn’t matter, according to the source.

Those are sunk costs, he indicated.

The group’s “rational” approach is to assess the situation on its merits, the source said.

A new boiler would ensure trouble-free operation for many years, Mulhollen said.

Asked whether installing a new boiler would diminish the K-4’s authenticity, Mulhollen said maybe, if the museum were planning to make the K-4 a static display, but maybe not – given the plans to run it.

The boiler that came with the locomotive the museum inherited after it went out of revenue service in 1956 wasn’t even installed until the 1930s or 1940s, anyway, Mulhollen said.

That boiler was like many other components not on the original machine 98 years ago, he said.

During its history, the K-4 devolved into a conglomeration of parts from different periods, installed when others wore out, according to Mulhollen and Reindl.

Such turnover was in keeping with the PRR’s practice of standardization, which it pioneered, and which enabled it to interchange parts within and sometimes between classes of locomotives, according to Mulhollen, Reindl and the source.

“They were not trying to preserve history,” Mulhollen said of PRR decision makers. “They were trying to run a railroad.”

And because the end of the line for the K-4 was also the end of the line for steam power on the railroad, the K-4 was especially “tired” at the end, as the PRR minimized investment in the doomed technology, Reindl said.

To illustrate, he pointed to a smoke baffle, a non-critical piece of flat steel about a yard long and a foot high, with multiple cuts that look to have been made with a burning torch, carelessly.

Those jagged edges contrast with the precise outlines of a replacement baffle fabricated by the volunteer crew.

‘Turns men into kids’

The K-4 represents the best of Altoona, when so many worked for the railroad, building machines like the K-4 virtually from scratch – casting, forging and welding iron and steel, fashioning copper, bronze and brass; making bolts and lubricants, testing individual items like lightbulbs and assembling and testing the completed engines, Reindl said.

The scale of the K-4 is intimidating – the size of the components, their thickness and weight, their number and complexity and the science behind the operations they perform.

There’s pride to be taken in that, said Reindl, who works with three machinists and an electrician.

People should realize the opportunity represented by the K-4, he said.

“It’s real, and it’s here,” Reindl said.

“It turns old men into kids,” said former state Rep. Rick Geist, who was involved as early as 1985 in the effort to get the K-4 running again.

Geist and Reindl both recalled the crowds that came to see the K-4 during the excursions run in the late 1980s, after quick-and-dirty repairs got the locomotive running again before a catastrophic failure shut it down.

That same excitement would recur, they said, if and when the K-4 is brought back into operation.

“There have been a lot of bumps,” Mulhollen said. “But we haven’t given up.”

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.