02/21/2026
The following post was provided by Dave Althaus about ATSF 5704.
Today (2-16) the project reached a critical milestone. The Diesel engine was started and appeared to run totally normal. The RPM's surged a little but that's not surprising considering the engine hasn't operated for 15 years or so. There were a few minor water leaks which were quickly taken care of but that was all that needed to be done. It ran for 15 minutes or more and warmed up very nicely. Getting the engine running was the final result of a lot of work.
When the 5704 arrived at SCRM, loose crab nuts were found, Rod basket nuts were finger tight and a lot of other things were found and repaired, The air box was cleaned of years of accumulation. The oil pan was cleaned of stuff that had been left in there. The suction oil strainer was inspected and found to have a leg of a pair of blue jeans, and a couple of handfuls of ball bearings and other chunks of metal in there. Obviously we needed to understand where those pieces came from. Ball bearings had to have come from a water pump somehow but we inspected those and all was fine. The conclusion was that all the debris was left over from previous major failures and the oil pan was never cleaned out. Of course finding a leg from a pair of blue jeans really demonstrated the level of maintenance that set a new level of poor quality in our view. The first two pictures show what was found in the oil suction strainer.
The other major problem we found was that during its years in storage, the stack cover was sitting crosswise and not keeping out rain. Of course no one cared since the locomotive was in the dead line. The drain hole in the turbo became plugged and about 2 feet of water was captured in the bottom of the turbo. So the turbo had to be taken out and sent out for a complete overhaul. It took about a month before we had it back and reinstalled.
While the turbo was out, we noticed the aux generator bearings were bad. So that had to be removed and have new bearings installed. For those of you that have removed an auxiliary generator from one of these locomotives, you'll know how difficult that is.
The air compressor had a cracked low pressure head. A new one was donated to the project and installed. It worked perfect.
A couple of the fuel injectors were frozen and replaced. Plus dozens of other details attended to.
A new set of batteries was installed knowing the initial start-up would problem result in extra cranking. And of course paying attention that the starter motors weren't overheated.
The first attempt at starting didn't work out. The engine just wouldn't fire off. Even with a couple of squirts of dreaded Ether, it just wouldn't fire. The thought was that even with prelubing, the cylinder walls and piston rings were too dry to develop adequate compression. Before the next attempt, oil was squirted on top of all 20 pistons as the automatic barring over tool slowly rotated the engine. Then with a little more coaxing, the engine fired up and appeared to run perfectly.
With the Diesel engine now given a probable good health report, our next step is to continue repairing the wiring damage that copper thieves did while the locomotive was in dead line storage. Fortunately we received a spare running take-out electrical cabinet along with the locomotive. The copper thieves stole all of the accessible 1325/24 traction cable and any other cable they could access. But all of the damage was confined to the air room by the AR10 alternator. They didn't cut any of the cables that run along the outside frame of the locomotion going to the traction motors.
But what they did steal in addition the the cables, were some of the bus bars plus all of the contactor copper straps. So essentially every power and reverser contactor has to be replaced with the spares from the donor cabinet. Fortunately for us, the copper thieves did not cut the large bundles of control wiring. It appears they only cut about thirty of those individual wires. They could have cut hundreds of control wires but apparently they must have felt they couldn't harvest enough copper from those 10 gauge wires. That saved us hundreds of hours. However, repairing the large traction cables will still take hundreds of hours. And there is no room for error in doing this. It has to be perfect the first time. Miswires could result in very costly unintended problems. So, take our time and do it correct the first time. As a rough estimate, we will need around 300 feet of 1325/24 Exane or equivalent cable. A preliminary quote came in at roughly $10,000 just for the new cable. Cable splices run about $40 each. Connectors can run up to $80 each. Shrink tubing can run up to about $40 each. And depending on how we do the rewiring, we may need to make between 30 and 60 splices depending on our plan. We will have a planning meeting later this week to home in on a process. John Salvini, our key technical volunteer and experienced old head, retired from Santa Fe and was on the crews that totally rewired these exact locomotives years ago. He knows how it has to be done so our plan will be designed by him and followed by the rest of us.
This video is not the first start, but one of the subsequent starts during testing.
