What, Is It Winter Already?

The regular operating season is pretty much over.  Happy Holidays Railway is coming up in December, to be sure, and if you are a small child, or have small children, or know somebody who has small children and would be willing to let you borrow them, that would be a great thing to do.  But the display barns are closed until next spring.  That has its advantages, as you'll see.

The B&G guys were hard at work today, collecting the benches and putting them into the barns, cleaning out and storing the recycling and trash cans, and all the many other unglamorous but necessary things they do.

I was now able to move the scaffold out onto the paving, so I can finish stripping the one remaining side of the 36. After arriving at the property, I realized I had left my earmuffs and safety glasses at home, so there was no sanding and thus no painting today.  But I could do a lot of paint stripping with the heat gun.  I worked on finishing the door frame, and started on the letterboard, upper siding, and the window section.  The car now reads "Columbia Park and South" so there's some progress.

You can't see it, but I have sheets of plywood under the scaffold extending to the rail to catch all the paint chips and debris so it can be collected and disposed of properly.  And if I'm using the heat gun, I always stop at least half an hour before leaving, to make sure nothing is smoldering in some hidden nook or cranny.  You can't be too careful!

Bob Kutella and Gerry Dettloff made two trips to Owl Lumber to pick up hardwood for several projects the other day.  One of them will be making new third rail beams for the 36.  Here are the raw pieces.  I'm hoping the shop guys will do this for me over the winter under Bob's expert guidance, so I can continue working on the cars in Barn 8.  This is an excellent project for people to help with during the cold weather, in our nice heated shop.  Of course, this high-quality lumber isn't cheap.  I don't have the exact figure yet, but the total for four beams will be about $500.  The hardware we got from Trolleyville needs to be dug out of storage sometime.  That sounds interesting, anyone want to help?

Meanwhile, there were several other projects moving forward, even on a relatively slow day such as Thursday.  Tim Peters, with the help of Frank Kehoe, is making great progress on a complete roof job on the 4412.  The canvas was soaked before being placed on the car, but it hasn't dried out completely yet, so Tim didn't want to start tacking it down quite yet.

 

And Max Tyms is now busily installing the crossarms for trolley wire over the connector track!  This will be a great improvement. The connector track allows us to turn cars around without using the main wye, but until now it's required the use of a locomotive.

I had often wondered just how fast a CA&E car would have to be going to coast all the way along the connector from the Barn 8 leads to South Junction, but now that won't be necessary.  Drat!