As you drive up to the Riverhead Museum site the first thing you will see is a small tank engine sitting on Iron beams. This is BEDT Engine 16, a large eyesore at the museum. With the newly painted Caboose right next to this engine, she continues to look even worse, with a new cosmetic restoration under way.
STEP ONE: Make necessary repairs to the belly of Engine 16. This was necessary to prevent the weather from getting in and rusting out the boiler. It also would make it easier when the time came to lift Engine 16, not having a boiler falling apart. We called our good friends at Norh Fork Welding and Supply and they made us an aluminum under belly that was fitted under the engine and does all the things that where just listed!!!! This thing looks great to, like the original. Now with the new metal in place it needs to be painted and protected to prevent that from Rusting. Special Thanks goes to Anthony DeBellis & Don Fisher for etching the belly in acid and painting it with Heavy duty Marine Paint. Engine 16 is coming along and we can move on!
STEP TWO: Provide a Place for Engine 16’s Drivers to Rest while she is lifted up so the wheels can easily slide along in place. Now that may seem easy but what do we actually place the wheels to the locomotive on so it is easy to roll them under the engine? Solution! There are tracks that are still in the ground that use to be in service by the LIRR that start under Engine 19 and stop under Engine 16.
Step 2 was to unbury these rails in preparation for the large 4 ton wheels. Special Thanks goes to Anthony DeBellis and Joe Saullo for removing 7 wheel barrels of dirt for 16’s wheels!
STEP THREE:Now that we have a place for the wheels the fun part comes. Enter Crane, provided by North Fork Welding & Supply. Now we moved Engine’s 16 3 large 4 Ton drivers over from the front of the museum over to the rails in front of the Engine. Each truck was marked for the location it went which made work go quickly. Engine Side 1 Firemen Side 1 are examples of how the move was done. We moved the wheels on top of our crane truck, first one then two drivers. We also moved closer to the locomotive the journal brasses that will be applied to the axles on the locomotive. Work went by quickly done very safely. From the Museum side we had working Don Fisher, Joe Costa Sr. Joe Costa Jr. and Anthony DeBellis. A special thanks go out to North Fork Welding & Supply for donating the crane for this move, and to Rich Clark of North Fork Welding who donated his time to help us make the move and operate the crane! We could not have done it with out Rich, and we are forever grateful to him for his help!
The next step for this project is cleaning up the drivers and frame of the locomotive so the wheels can be placed under them. We also plan to start paint removal on the engine and wood work in the cab. The cab will soon have all new opening doors and windows with steps so the public will be able to walk in the cab, Ring 16’s bell and see what it was like to run a steam engine.
While we had a crane on the property we also moved one of our artifacts we donated to the Oyster Bay RR Museum for preservation. In the yard we had a
LIRR Armstrong switch machine on a flat car taking up space. The museum has an operating tower in Greenport of BLISS, so we where not interested in the machine for an exhibit in Riverhead. We where glad to find a new home for the piece that could use it. The crane was provided by North Fork Welding. The truck that moved the levers to OB was provided by Bob Pfluger of BP Wreckers.
