Streetcar tour

Turnout in the Car Shop was low on Sunday: for much of the day there were only four of us out. When I arrived I was taken on a whirlwind tour of recent streetcar work courtesy of Frank Sirinek. This included updates on the Veracruz open car, for which he is refinishing seats; the West Towns car, which is nearly ready to have its control group sequenced; the Shaker Heights/Minneapolis PCC from Trolleyville, which has had its interior repainted and its windows replaced; and the Kansas City PCC, which is Frank's next big project. On the latter car he and his crew have replaced or rebuilt the windows and seat frames on the entire blind side of the car and will next proceed to the door side after some interior painting; below Frank is shown behind the operator's position. This car was given a "corn broom" paint job by yours truly about ten years ago and it's terrific to see all the work that Frank is putting into it!Following this I turned my attention to the 205, right across the aisle from the KCPS PCC, where I did some more interior cleaning. All of the remaining aluminum drip rails have now been removed from the car and discussions are in the works about shipping them to Yakima, Washington to be reunited with the cars which (I think) they belong to. Among the last of the pieces that were stored atop the car's seats were some ~15' long planks which formed the "walls" over the side windows. Too large to slide underneath the seats easily, it appeared that the easiest place to store these would be in their original location. Greg Kepka (below) helped install the ones on the north side of the car; the ones on the south side of the car will wait until after the 205 is painted since removing the side windows will be much harder with these planks installed.
Below left, the interior of the car as it appears now with most of the materials off the seat backs. Note the wall planks installed on the left while the ones on the right are temporarily stored on the seat backs. My final project for the day was to complete chemically stripping the last of the paint off of the 205's final brass end window, shown below right upon completion of this project. This was taken over to the car for future installation.









Besides helping on the 205, Greg was working with Rod on repairing and reinstalling the motorman's signal whistle and valve in the 277 and Andy S. was working on the compressor for the 1100.