She's back! Well, at least for a while. After nearly 8 months of downtime for running gear maintenance, Valley Railroad #40 is now back in the service, seen here taking a dead-head passenger extra north to Deep River just before 5PM on a sunny Sunday in late August. Until very recently, the 40 was sitting up on jacks, and looking like this. Now however, she looks and sounds great.
Over the course of the next 4 months, the 40 will alternate with the 3025 in regular operations, using up the last remaining service days before her FRA Form 4 expires in early 2014. The boiler inspection and flue replacement is expected to begin right after the line's North Pole Express operations end in December of this year. In order to avoid a really protracted service outage on the 40, the folks at the Valley have been chipping away at some of the major maintenance items a little at a time. The just-completed running gear work was a significant part of that process. The goal has been to ensure that there will always be 2 steam engines available for service during the November-December time-frame, because that is when the railroad sees the heaviest passenger traffic of the year. If all goes well, the 40 should get her 1472-day inspection completed and be back in service for the holidays in 2014.
