First the bad news: we were planning to run the 36 and 319 for CA&E Day, but as the train was pulling out of the barn, I noticed the 36 had another grid failure and was leaving a trail of arcs and sparks. Not good! We pulled it back in so I could look at it. The rest of the crew, Bob Opal and Sam Polonetzky, then took the two steel cars for revenue service. The grid fault could not easily be patched, but at least it's not one of the boxes we've already rebuilt. For the Pageant tomorrow, we're only scheduled to make one trip, and I plan to run the 36 as a control trailer with the 319. We've done things like this before. Here's the Brookins Express outside during a switch move to rearrange some of the cars in Barn 8. After giving up on patching the grid box, I helped Joel and Ray with switching for a while.
And after that was done, I rejoined the crew on the CA&E train.
I think we had a pretty good crowd of visitors today. In particular, we had visitors from several other trolley museums: McKinney Avenue, Branford, and Rio Vista. And I met some blog readers and made new friends.
The 36 was not the only car to develop a minor problem today: the 714 had a stuck magnet valve, so the 251 was brought out for a rare appearance. It's always good to see it in operation.
There may be some minor changes to the printed schedule for tomorrow, but the weather should be perfect and the Trolley Pageant should be a good time for everybody. See you there!
If you hadn't have written this wouldn't have known that the 36 wasn't powered. It was good to ride in a car that is over 110 years old. Talked to a couple of guys that were from Michigan. They were in awe of the size of the museum.
ReplyDeleteTodd