Hear That Lonesome Whistle

Back here in Illinois, it was probably going to be too cold for any finish painting in the smoker, so I started work on the #1 vestibule instead.  Most of it is in pretty good condition, but it all needs to be painted blue in this paint scheme.

First, several removable parts, such as the flag box seen on the left, are removed to be stripped and repainted in the shop.  Stripping the ceiling takes a while, but most of the area seen here was done by the end of the day.

 

But that gets old in a hurry.   It seemed like a good time to put a first coat of primer on the floor of the smoker.  This brown primer, at least when it's wet, is fairly close to the finish color.  It sure is a big improvement over the old red paint.  I also wanted to see whether the duct tape remnants would disappear under the paint.  

So far, so good.

I really like the furniture legs on the stationary seats.  The later cars don't have anything like this.

Gerry Dettloff is working on the Milwaukee Electric D13, a Differential dump motor.  He's making good progress on getting the actual dump mechanism working.  The drop sides are closed by activating a couple of brake cylinders, essentially, which tighten a steel cable wrapped around several pulleys, and so on.  It's rather complicated.  For the actual dumping, the car needs a motor, basically a small traction motor.  We are thought to have one of the correct type in stock, from another dump car that was scrapped, but the challenge now is to locate it.  Anyway, Gerry fixed some problems with the air piping and tested out the whistles to make sure they don't leak.

And of course Tim Peters was continuing to paint the new window frames for the 24, and many other things too, I'm sure.

In other news, I'm told the younger guys have been working like crazy to finish repainting the two L cars over in the Cretney barn, but I didn't feel like hiking over there to photograph it.  The cars right now are covered with plastic, so you wouldn't see much anyway.  But when the news breaks out, we'll break in.