Stay Inside

It was a beautiful day today, as long as you were inside.  We're lucky to have so many historic cars stored inside, safe from the ravages of the weather.  We're never satisfied, so the track guys were hard at work getting ready to build two more barns.  Meanwhile, inside Barn 8:

A first coat of finish cream was applied to the center ceiling.  It looks delicious!  

The car numbers at each end are decals, but it may not be easy to get correct decals made.  In the smoker, the paint and decals were in pretty good shape, so I tried painting around them.  With a little more adjustment, this may work out pretty well.  Unfortunately, at the other end things are noticeably worse.  I'm researching the available options, so stay tuned.

And there was more sanding and painting as the day wore on.

The process of  prepping and painting the entire ceiling makes it obvious how many parts don't fit together quite right.  I suspect that this is because the entire interior was removed from all  of

these cars back in the 1910-1915 

era to install steel reinforcements to the car's framing.  This was illustrated in railway trade journals at the time.   And putting it all back together required exposed screw heads in various places, and parts that don't quite fit.  I doubt the car looked like this when it came from the builder.  The 309, in contrast, never received the steel reinforcements, so there are no obvious mismatches like this.  Just another bit of historical trivia.

Part of the bulkhead is hinged to open to access the wheels on the pocket door, but it no longer closes completely.  Another casualty of the rebuilding, as I take it.

The 321 has been moved from Yard 14 to the front of Barn 11.  I would like to apply another tarp sometime soon, when it's not so windy, and this is a more convenient location.

And in Barn 4, Tim is working as always on the 24.  Here he is stripping paint from the ceiling.

And for more modern L cars, we now have this test stand for the control system on the 2200-series cars.  Since the CTA no longer needs it, they gave it to us.  The attached plate says it was used for training motormen on these cars.   We could use more of these!