It's time for a report on another busy day. Frank and I worked on finishing lubrication on the 308, and did most of the 309. And we needed to switch the order of the cars, so all four were out and moving under their own power. Frank gets to do most of the hard work because he's not old and fat. Yet.
The 308 and 319 should be operating next Monday (Memorial Day), weather permitting.
And lots of other big projects were getting attention. Mark Secco and Dan Fenlaciki were working on setting up the cranes for lifting the new 130' turntable off its flatcar tomorrow. It weighs 60 tons. More on this later.
And the motor truck for CRT 24 was assembled. Bob Olson sent me these pictures of the assembly process, since we were otherwise occupied at the time. Here Gerry is running the big forklift.
Later, Tim worked on getting the bearings properly seated. This is not easy, since we are assembling parts from several different trucks.
And the Wednesday crew is repainting the TM container car. It's really looking nice.
Jeff and Norm are welding in new pieces on the Michigan car.
Later in the day, I briefly helped Mark and Dan a little on the turntable. It will be supported by this large sling, a loop of extra-strong composite material.
In this video, you can see the spreader bar being raised to put tension on the sling, and finally one end of the table is lifted into the air as a test. The big lift, Mark says, will be tomorrow (Thursday).
Great to see the museum use their own cranes for the unloading instead of renting them as most museums do these days. Hope someone can take some good videos of the unloading process. And thanks for the doodlebug reports!
ReplyDeleteWill the Wednesday crew also refurbish the container for the container car? It probably would be possible to locate an old trailer that the container could ride on. I recall seeing hard-rubber tired truck trailers from the 20s in use by contractors in Chicago in the 1980s.
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