Boiling Water!

We'll start with something more exciting than anything I could accomplish. The Steam Team test fired the 428 today, and it was great to see smoke rising into the air and hear the steam whistle blowing. Tom Schneider and all of his crew can be very proud of their accomplishments so far.

Watch out! We're blowing down the boiler!

It struck me again how much more involved this whole process is than just meggering a few motors and putting oil in the armature bearings. Congratulations!

Sorry, that's as good as it gets. I started the day by installing two of the repainted ventilators on the 277 with a combination of screws and nails. There are two more ready to go, but I ran out of caulk.

These ventilators don't actually ventilate anything due to the installation of air conditioning, but they were left in place until the end of service. They were removed when the roof was covered with tar paper. However, it was then no longer possible to know where the holes in the roof were, so over the years klutzes like me broke holes in the tar paper, as you can see here. So until the ventilators are reinstalled, there are huge holes in the roof covering, making it dangerous to run the cars if there's any threat of rain.

I got three more ventilators out of storage and put a first coat of primer on them. They're generally in good shape. We're lucky to have a complete set --it's amazing how many different forms of roof ventilators there were for such a simple function.

I then spent several hours repainting window frames and stripping others for the 277.

I spent some time showing visitors through the 309, after they started asking questions about the wood cars. Hey, it beats working!

Frank Sirinek gave me a copy of some interesting CA&E documents he got from Wendell Dillinger -- these are detailed descriptions of the cars from June 1922, about eight pages each, of our three wood cars. I'll have more about these after I've had a chance to analyze them. In return, I gave him (well, not him personally, IRM) a West Towns switch lock and key which I found in an antique store in Upper Michigan while on vacation. Who would have thought?