Let's Have a Party

Today was the annual Christmas party for the Wednesday group, with plenty of good food and desserts, preceded by a rousing chorus of "Jingle Bells." Here we come a-wassailing...

I began studying the control system for the Charles City Western locomotive in earnest. This is going to be more of a challenge than I had hoped. Many years ago, a couple of well-meaning neophytes disconnected and disassembled much of the wiring in the cab without making any diagrams, and then left. So putting it all back together is puzzling, to say the least. Much of it is familiar from the GE control systems for interurban cars, so I have some experience to go on, but there are differences in locomotives for which I'll probably need to study the Com Ed 4. For instance, there seem to be no control fuses. How can that be?

Here is one of the controllers. I traced all its connections back to the header panel in the contactor group, and the controller itself seems to be in pretty good condition. So that's a plus.

To the right is the contactor group back under the hood. There is no way to open the hood. I was able to crawl back through there, but I don't want to be next to it when there's 600V present, so I'm not even sure how to tell which contactors are energized when (called"sequencing" the group). It's so much easier on passenger cars where the group is located under the car and can easily be accessed.

The big circuit breaker located inside the cab. It must be exciting when this opens under load!

Part of the time I was helped by Project Manager Pete Galayda, and part of the time by Dan Fenliciki.

The sun was shining, so I worked on the roof of the 277 some more, installing saddles temporarily. We've run out of the correct screws, so I'm ordering some more.

I also started sorting the parts stored in the main compartment of the 277. This had been used for parts for all of the various IT cars; some of them I will move over to the 321. I moved a worklight into the car, and I'll need a couple more.

Mr. Socks is clearly annoyed, even bitter, at all the attention that has lately been lavished on his arch-rival Alco. But some of us are still friends of the undercat. Here he is, sulking in his own personal file drawer, filed under C for cat.