Back from Vacation

Posting has been on hold the last two weeks because Frank has been working like a dog, and I was on vacation in Arizona, heh heh. Not much railfanning, though; we spent our time visiting mountains, canyons, craters, petrified forests, cocktail parties, and things like that. But now, back to work!

I started by looking through our store of spare parts, and I found the window latch track I was looking for. This part was a spare from the 318, which IRM acquired for parts back in 1977. So I installed it in the 308, which had been missing one of these when we got it. Now all the windows are complete. Here we see the 308 patiently awaiting its return to service. Inspection of the car has been scheduled for Saturday, May 10th, and it should be operating on Memorial Day, May 26th.

Then I spent several hours sanding down one side of the 309, in preparation for completely repainting it. The car will have not only all new paint, but improved numbers and lettering when we're done. After all that sanding I felt kind of blue, but luckily it washed right off! I then worked on repainting the wall panels in the main compartment with a new coat of green.