Window of Opportunity

I did some more work on 518 windows today. I can see already that these blog posts are going to get kind of boring. The car has 28 inside windows, and making it sound interesting would tax the abilities of a better writer than myself. Maybe we can tell dirty jokes instead. Anyhow, I finished stripping the second pair, which I removed last week. I put a first coat of primer on the outside surfaces, and stain on the inside. And a second coat of varnish (L) on the inside of the first pair. One of the second pair has a broken pane which will need to be replaced.

The 518 windows have several layers of paint on the outside. The car had, I believe, three exterior paint schemes while it was in regular service, and then was repainted for work service. Then it belonged to Maury Klebolt and was repainted while it was stored in Champaign, then it was repainted in the orange and maroon paint scheme when it was acquired by IRM. It appears the windows were never stripped down to bare wood, until now. Fortunately, the insides were never painted; they're still in stain and varnish, so stripping is relatively easy. Whew!

To the left, here's the new wig-wag at the corner of Depot and Springfield, which is in operation. And to the right, even though it was Sunday, there were four contractors working on Barn 11.

That reminds me of a good story about the construction of Barn 9. It was built early in the spring, about 30 years ago. The company brought down two crews from Canada to finish it in record time, since I suppose Canada was still covered in snow and ice. Checker's was the only restaurant in town, of course, so when Checker arrived in the morning there was a long line of hungry men waiting patiently at the door. They quickly ate up all the food he had for breakfast, so when the regular customers arrived he had nothing to offer them. Then they came back and ate up all his lunch. That sort of annoyed everybody. So Checker decided to bake up two large pans of meat loaf - that ought to fix them! Unfortunately, he didn't realize that the next day was Ash Wednesday. The men were all French Canadians and good Catholics, so they couldn't eat meat on Ash Wednesday. Checker was left with two huge pans of meat loaf he could hardly give away! Here, want some meat loaf???