Tacks Enough Already?

The answer is "not yet," but we're making good progress.

Most of the day was spent helping Frank Sirinek, Mike Stauber, and Tim Peters tack down the canvas on the 451. Frank, Mike, and I retensioned the canvas and managed to pull out the wrinkles, so we could start nailing.

Here Mike is pulling down on the canvas with a special pair of pliers while Frank (not shown) is nailing in the tacks. A temporary row of tacks is put in a few inches above the tack molding to hold the canvas in place. This makes it much easier to pull the bottom fold into position for tacking.

Here Tim is expertly nailing in the permanent two rows of tacks. It's best to have two teams working on opposite sides of the car, so they can pull the canvas against each other and get it as flat as possible. We start in the middle and work outwards towards both ends.

By the end of the day we had nailed down about half of both sides of the car.

I also did some interior work on the 319 in my spare time. (L) This is a section which had been partly stripped at Cleveland. After a new coat of finish paint ("butterscotch pudding") it looks like this (R):






Today was also a car cleaning day, and there was a good crowd out to work on cleaning up cars for revenue service. The 308 and 309 were done, among others. Here's a new member mopping the floor of the 308. I asked him his name but didn't write it down -- sorry! Anyhow, thanks to everybody who helped!!!

Julie gave me some more CA&E pictures which I'll scan in as soon as I get a chance.

And the 431 and 460 were being test run as a train for part of the day. The "Archer/Broadway" sign is totally bogus, but other than that it looks pretty good!