Thanks for the Tanks

Today was a nice day for working on all sorts of things.  I started with more painting on the interior of the 36, as usual.  On our other cars the foot rests are painted the same brown as the floor, but on this car it was evident that the foot rests had been painted with the lower wall color, so I did all of them with first finish color.  And then started on extending the first finish color on the floor.

Larry Stone went to the Board meeting, as he is applying for regular membership, and when he got back to the property he started helping me with paint.  

Then we got the news that one of the 36's air tanks that had been taken over to the Steam Shop for testing needed to be cleaned up.  This is the tank that was on the car and had not started leaking, so it still had several decades' worth of paint, tar, grime, and dirt covering it.  The guys need to see the metal surface for hydro testing, so all these layers of detritus need to be removed.  The steam guys are very friendly and cooperative, and let us use their wire wheelers to clean up the tank.  We really appreciate the expert help we're getting.

 After the novelty wears off, this isn't much fun, but within an hour or so we had the tank cleaned off to Tom's standards.  It suddenly came back to me why I had switched from steam to electric about forty years ago.  I should have gotten a picture of us after this process was done: non-angels with dirty faces.

And then we were able to do some more painting.   Larry worked on the floor while I did some paint scraping in the #1 vestibule, which is the next focus of attention after the floor gets painted.  

I should mention that CAR CLEANING is coming up.  Many of our visitors are civilized folk who would prefer not to ride in dirty cars, and we have more cars used in regular service than ever before, so there's lots of cleaning to be done in the spring.  It's easy, useful, convivial, and enhances one's self-esteem, so what more could you want?  Anybody and everybody can help.  The first car cleaning day will be Saturday, March 26, so we expect to see you there unless you have an ironclad excuse, such as living in California.  And I'm sure Ted would be here if he could.