Happy Holidays

Today the Museum was running our Happy Holiday Railway again, and in spite of the dreary weather, there seemed to be a fairly good crowd.  Tomorrow is the last day for this event, by the way. 

 

After the train pulls in, people are welcomed into the diner annex, where hot chocolate is served and kids can visit with Santa.  The diner itself was pretty crowded.  If you need Christmas presents, this is the place to go.  I was dressed in my working clothes, so I didn't want to force my way through the crowd to say hello to Santa.  I've met him before.

 Here's the train, waiting at the crossing.  The interiors are nicely decorated.  

 

Randy Allegrezza was the conductor, and Jerry Saunders (not shown) was the motorman.

 

 

And the new articulated trolley bus was running to take people between the parking lot and the diner.

And in other news, Larry Stone was out again to help on the 36.  We decided this was a good opportunity to finish wire-wheeling the exposed side sill, and then paint it.  Larry did pretty much all of this himself.  (By the way, I hope you don't look at your stunning new 2015 calendar too closely.  We're gonna finish it, I promise!) 

And then we both worked on the interior.   Here Larry is installing the repainted window shade tracks, which is not as easy as it looks. 

 He also did some interior painting. 

 

Several parts got first finish paint.   And I sanded down and put first primer on the corner seats, as seen below.

 

 

And then, I removed the first arm rest for repainting.  These are a different design than the slightly later seats on the 308 and 309.  And I started stripping this arm rest with a heat gun, making sure that there is no inlay or veneer involved; the arm rest is just solid pieces of wood.

 

 Luckily I have just the right type of furniture scraper for this work.  This would be an excellent project to work on in our nice heated shop for helpers, if I had any.  

And as usual, there were lots of other things going on, too many to list.  At IRM, we never let winter stop us!