Ready... Set...

Frank writes...

Sunday at IRM was all (well, almost all) about getting ready for the big ATRRM Convention that starts this week.  The property was abuzz with activity, including plenty of "recreational switching" to get equipment needed for seminars into position as well as other prep work.  Joel, Richard, Greg, Doodlebug Dan and Rod were all working on switching at various times and all of them were also making repairs to equipment as needed.  Bill Wulfert was there, washing windows in the barns for the third day in a row - a thankless task if ever there was one, but something that was badly needed and is very much appreciated!

As for me, my job was to get the 36 running so that all four cars in our CA&E wood train will be fully operational.  When I arrived, the other department workers had kindly painted the grid box frame black as shown above.  I spent a bit of time cleaning up the grid element suspension rods and locating brass washers, then assembly began (using our new mica tubes and washers, natch).

Tah-dah!  And here's the final product.  This box is a 4A10-7A8 if memory serves but I neglected to paint that on the box... at some point I should probably crawl under the 36 and do that.  I'll add it to my list of things to do.  In the meantime, I managed to cart the thing over to Barn 8 and install it.  Some of the shunts between boxes on the 36 are made of trolley wire, which made tightening down the taps a bit of a chore, but I finally managed to get it all in place.

So here we are.  Three of the 36's five grid boxes have been rebuilt and we'll get the remaining two done over the winter.  Dan helped out by visually examining the boxes during a brief test with the car's brakes set and nothing seemed amiss so the 36 is now cleared for service.

After this I cleaned up our grid rebuilding area in the shop and put the spare parts left over from the rebuild job (mostly old, but usable, mica washers) back into our grid storage area.  And with help from Joel and Dan I dug out four CA&E marker lanterns and a "bulls-eye" rear end marker and fiddled with the burners to make sure they were usable.  We should have enough working (?) ones to fully equip a train for night operations on Museum Showcase Weekend this Saturday and not have to carry the markers through the train at each end of the line (though we will need to carry the "bulls-eye" marker through the train).  This should make things easier in general.  Right now our plan, weather permitting, is to run a four-car wood train during the day on Saturday and run one or two cars at night.  One or two cars may come out on Thursday or Friday for a few demonstration runs as well.  It should be a fun weekend!