Tick, Tick, Tick

The Illinois Terminal Society annual meeting will be held at IRM on Saturday, April 30th this year. You do not want to miss it! Meanwhile, time is ticking away so we're working like madmen to get things ready. Your Museum has, of course, the only comprehensive and operational collection of IT equipment, and we want to demonstrate it to the fullest.

Work has mostly concentrated on our IT combine #277. I installed the new section of window sill seen here. It needs another coat of primer over the filler, but it was too cold today. After the primer, we'll put on a coat or two of Traction Orange.

Most of the day was spent attacking the double window post seen earlier, which was badly rotted out. I cut out and adjusted the replacement post for the right side, as seen here.

Then it was trimmed and installed. I then started working on the left side. The wood needs to be trimmed down to a straight line that we can fit the replacement pieces to, and doing this with a chisel is time-consuming and tiring. It struck me that it would probably be faster just to drill a few holes and start blasting. But the others would probably want me to pull the car out of the barn first, and there was too much junk in the way. So that plan was abandoned.

The left-hand post needs to be in two sections, connected by a ship lap. I have essentially finished the lower half, although more trimming of the original post is needed. But good progress is being made.

I took some time to walk out to the 321. Icicles are hanging from the tarp, but everything seems to be OK. As usual, I climbed up the side of a nearby boxcar to check the top of the tarp.

Lots of other projects were being worked on, too many to list. These include other parts of the 277. Joel Ahrendt was stripping the old paint from baggage racks, down to the bare brass. These will be painted silver, unfortunately.

Scott Greig inspected the controller.

As I say, there were many different projects going on. Here Dave Fullarton is working on toys for tots, it appears.