319 Progress

No new railroad cars showed up at the interchange this week, so Nick must be dozing off.  I suppose everybody needs to take a break once in a while.  Be that as it may, many of the rest of us are keeping busy with various projects.

Henry Vincent continues to work on repairing a train door from the 36.  He has taken the new pieces home for trimming, and plans to have them installed soon.

I did more stripping in the #2 vestibule of the 319, as seen here.  You have to use your imagination, but the car was built with a door to close off the motorman's part of the vestibule, although that didn't last long.  All of the paint in the vestibule is badly alligatored, so I'm stripping it down to bare wood for repainting.  What may look like black paint in these pictures is actually the original Pullman Green with which the car was delivered in 1914.  The CA&E never bothered to strip the vestibules, which may be why the 1953 paint job hasn't held up for 60 years.  But the underlying green is in remarkably good condition after 99 years.  They just don't make 'em like they used to.

The final section of the ceiling in the main compartment got a first coat of finish color, and looks pretty good.  This is where the panel had come loose and was sagging down.  I also did some touch-up on various places, so the entire ceiling is now painted.  I'll want to do a second coat, but that will wait until later this year when I can pull the car outside for natural lighting and warmer conditions. I'll also want to see if any of the repairs I made to the ceiling come loose when the car starts to move.  We've noticed that these Jewett cars seem to flex quite noticeably when in operation!

And here's some first primer in the vestibule.  I also cleaned some of the hardware down to bare metal, and it will be painted next time.

And of course there were many other people out today, working on various things.  Be sure to read the department blogs to keep up to date.