Building a Better Lobster Trap

The first thing to do today was to check up on the 308 and 309; everything looked fine. They operated both days over the weekend. On Saturday, I was the motorman with Greg Ceurvorst as conductor; after two trips it started to rain so the train had to be put away. Yesterday the cars operated for the Transport Extravaganza as seen here, with Jim Nauer and Dave Hammer.

Then it was on to the 277's interior. I sanded down some of the areas already painted and put on a first or second coat of white primer, including the sheet metal air conditioning duct seen at left.

Then I started to fix up the 277's lobster trap, as mentioned last time. This design is much easier to rebuild than the North Shore's. The longitudinal members are just steel plates, and the slats don't have much of a bend. On the North Shore all of these parts are wood and have to be steam-bent or cut to shape.

Three of the slats were missing parts, so they had to be removed, as seen here. I was able to re-use all of the machine screws that hold them in, however.

I scraped off all of the loose paint and rust and put brown primer on everything. This, of course, is the underside of the assembly. Next time I'll turn it over and paint the top side.





And here's a detail from an in-service photograph which shows what the trap will look like when it's installed. The next thing to install will be the ventilators along both sides of the roof.

And the Camp Grant is down to a pile of pieces, most of which are already in the dump trucks. Here we see a workman torching apart the underframe, and a pile of parts we're saving, such as a drawbar and the brake cylinder.

Soon the Camp Grant will be just another bad memory, like the mobile classrooms.