Duplicated Doors Done Despite Delay

The big news on the 205 today, news over two years in the making, was that the new door leaves were finally installed!

On the left is a view of the doors open, showing the varnished interior of the center-right door leaf complete with grab-iron to assist people boarding the car; on the right is a view of the doors closed showing both newly-built (and recently painted!) door leaves. The doors were mounted without incident after installation of the last piece of glass and the final remaining "window sticks."

The only remaining work to be done on the doors, other than painting the outboard (old) leaves, is to install the rubber molding along the inside edges where the left and right pair of door leaves meet. This molding will have to be ordered but we have a couple of potential sources for the material. In the meantime, I did some imitation woodworking to fabricate replacements for some missing wood inserts. Each door had a short (about 5" long) half-round screwed to the door edge at both the top and bottom, the purpose of which was to "form" the rubber molding. Shown below is one of the two remaining originals, plus the two new ones.In other news, I also sprayed the backs of the two retrievers (see previous 205 entry) with primer and removed the original doors from the 205 from storage in the car shop paint room. One of the doors basically disintegrated (after salvaging what I could I donated the remains to the Chock Department) and the other was deposited at the 205. I also hung around for a switch move, mentioned in the below post, involving both the 308 and 309. Shown here is a somewhat rare side-by-side view of the two cars which shows some of the minor differences in design between the Niles and Hicks products.