Thursday, November 19, 2009

Race Against Time

Here's what's happening now with Trolleyville, as far as we know:

CA&E car 36 is presently located in the E. 55th Street shops, and the other four are in the subway under Terminal Tower. In order to move them by road, they need to go to the Brook Park shops, near the airport. Unfortunately, that's not easy to do, since keeping the rapid transit system going is, of course, a higher priority for the GCRTA. Anyhow, once the cars are moved to Brook Park, we will need to prepare them for de-trucking by disconnecting motor leads, brake rigging, and perhaps trolley poles and other roof parts. We will probably only get one or two days' notice when this happens. Stan has a list of people who will be available on short notice to make the trip. Unfortunately, I won't be able to help unless it's on a weekend, I've got to work.

Once the cars are ready for shipment, Silk Road should be able to load and move them rapidly to Union. Once there, we'll save money if we can do the unloading ourselves. Again, this will be on short notice. Of course, we would like to put them inside as soon as possible to minimize exposure to the weather. This depends to some extent on how work on Barn 11 is going.

By the way, I can't express enough appreciation for all the work the Track Dept. is doing on the new barn.

So we don't have any sort of schedule on when the move will occur, and we probably won't. I'll try to keep you informed as it happens.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Randy,
How does the RTA plan to get our cars to Brook Park? I hope that do not plan to run them on their 750 volt power!
I don't think they have a locomotive.

Can they tow them with a rapid transit car?
Steve Iversen

Randall Hicks said...

They've run on 750V before, and the plan is to do it again. We can only keep our fingers crossed.

Anonymous said...

Hold it to full series and don't turn on any lights, and it "should" be OK.
When did GCRTA up their volts to 750, when they got rid of the PCCs?

Scott Greig said...

Yes, they did it when the PCCs were replaced with Bredas in the '80s.