Contactors and Contractors

Last night we had lots of wind and rain. When I arrived in the morning, these aluminum panels from Barn 8 were lying in the spot where I usually park. I first checked to see whether they had blown off the roof of the building -- that wouldn't be good! But they were some pieces that had been replaced earlier this year, and had blown off the stack. So I dragged them back into place and put some scrap lumber on them.

The 319 and 309 will be running this weekend, weather permitting. So I didn't try to do any painting on the 319. We still need trainmen for Sunday.

The main activity today was testing all of the contactors for the 36. On the whole, they appear to be pretty good. There is one bad coil, one contactor is missing its tips, one is missing its arc chute, one is still disassembled, and many of the contactor tips are pretty worn, although they might be serviceable for a while if we don't operate the car too much. There are 13 contactors, but three of these are used only in parallel, and we certainly have enough good parts to make ten of them operable. At least they are now all sorted out and tagged. The bad coil was on #1, and that brings up an interesting point.

Contactor coils are wired in series, and #1 is active on every point. If coil #1 was open, the car would not operate, and if it was intermittently open, the car would not operate reliably. I do not know for sure, and more investigation will be required, but it is possible that the only real problem with this control system was one bad coil, and that failure to properly diagnose the trouble led to having the whole system taken apart.

I also started in earnest on removing the exterior paint. That got old after a while, so let's see what else might be going on.

Tim Peters, of course, is still hard at work on the 1797. Here he displays the results of applying epoxy to the roof, to give it a nice smooth and hard surface. He uses a combination of liquid and solid epoxies to get a mixture that has the consistency of pancake batter. It seems to work very well.

Now that the 714 is done, Jim Followell is continuing on the 451. But that's not his only project. He's also working on polishing the exterior of the Zephyr, most of which is inside Barn 2, with the last two cars sticking out. One of his helpers, a young man named Riley, was hard at work prepping the surface with steel wool.

I pondered the concept of steel-wooling an entire five-car train by hand for a few minutes, and somehow the task of stripping one short wooden car didn't seem quite so immense. By the end of the day it looked like this. Not shown is the plastic cover on the ground to collect all the paint chips for proper disposal.

I also walked out to the 321 to check on the tarp. A couple of blocks were loose because the older-type rope I was using appeared to be biodegradable, so those were retied. Otherwise everything appears to be fine.

Finally, let's see what's happening outside in defiance of the elements. Several Bakley Bros. employees were working on ripping up the rest of the doomed asphalt, and preparing the ground for new paving. Here the big backhoe is loading the old material into a dump truck; it is then hauled out to the Yard 12 area and dumped.

Meanwhile, another man in a small dozer is grading the area for new material.


And two precast concrete boxes for electrical service are being buried under the intersection of Depot and Central. Be sure to observe the many safety barriers B&G has put up; especially with all the rain, footing is treacherous in this area.