Full metal jacket: Putting a blanket on a Mikado

I recently had a great day with eight other steam fans working on a privately-owned 2-8-2 being restored to operate at Wisconsin’s Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom. We spent a day installing the jacketing and lagging on Skip Lichter’s Saginaw Timber Co. No. 2. The 1912 Baldwin Mikado has been under restoration since soon after its last run in 2000. That was the last time steam ran at this long-time center of ancient locomotives and wooden passenger cars. It looks like 2015 will be the year steam returns. But before it does, there’s much work to be done.

We installed the ceramic fabric insulation (two layers to give it the desired thickness), secured it with rope and bungee cords first and metal banding later, and hoisted the sheet metal jacketing onto and slid it under the boiler, securing the pieces with long pieces of all thread rod. We wore eye and breathing protection, and because the shop is unheated, I insulated myself with thermal underwear, a shirt, a set of overalls, and topped it with a pair of insulated coveralls. Yes, even with all those clothes, I was able to move. We got much of the lagging placed on the boiler shell and covered one boiler course in jacketing.

There’s more yet to do, but that will be for a future Saturday project. On this day, I went home took a shower, got a good meal, and crashed, satisfied that I had played a small part in a big project that Skip and the museum are getting closer to completing. The work of jacketing and insulation is slow, tedious work, but it’s what has to happen before the smoke, the steam, the whistle, the flashing side rods come into focus.