Truck Swapping

Norm Krentel was there today, so he and I spent all day working on the 36 truck swap, as explained earlier. This is more complicated than it sounds. First of all, we need to pull the 303's motor truck out from under the 36 so it can be prepped and have the motors installed, so we need to find and prep a temporary shop truck for the carbody to sit on. And so that can happen, a motor truck from the 319 which was sitting in front of the 141 needs to go elsewhere. When the 319 arrived, we started work on removing the motors, but this job was abandoned. These motors are spares, so they might as well be stored on the truck. I installed most of the necessary bolts so the truck can be moved when we get a chance.

For a temporary shop truck, we have chosen a 4000 trailer truck sitting just outside Barn 4. We spent some time making careful measurements under the cars and of the available trucks, and this is the best choice. We also found the correct body center bearing, and this will be attached to a wooden shim when it's installed under the 36. Rod will help with the drilling and installation. I learned that when the trucks were swapped at Cleveland, it was the body bolster center bearings that were changed, not the truck bearings. That makes it somewhat harder. In any case, we're making pretty good progress on this project. It's a high priority because we have a definite drop-dead date to get everything ready.

Charlie has been painting the 319, meanwhile. He has put a first coat of red on the north side of the car (L) and the west end (R).

And on the south side, at least a first coat of the Aurora Gray. Jamie said they had wanted to pull the car out of the barn to look at it in natural light, but didn't because of the rain. I'm not sure that's necessary, but whatever. It looks good to me!

Thanks also to Stan and Joe who did some switching in Barn 8, and put the 309 at the door on 83. I'll start inspection on Monday.

Note from the IT department: we encourage constructive comments, and a couple of people had complained about the word recognition step. I've disabled this for the time being. We'll see if there's a problem with too much spam. One thing I learned from other bloggers is that you should leave comment moderation enabled for posts older than 7 days or so. For some unknown reason spammers tend to post comments to older messages. I've already gotten four spam comments to older posts, all obviously advertising porn, some in Spanish. Go figure. But that's not a big problem, so I hope you appreciate our continuing efforts to serve you, the viewer!