The Museum Never Sleeps

Even in the middle of winter, no matter how cold it may be outside, with our heated shop facilities we can keep working here at IRM.  A lot of progress is accomplished, and it's better than sitting at home watching TV, if you ask me.  (Not that I can say why you should....)

Anyway, let's start by looking at some of the other projects going on in the shop.  As always, Tim is hard at work.  Here he's making new window frames for CRT 1754.

Notice that he has the right cutters so that the rails fit into the stiles properly.  This is exactly the way it would be done for production runs back in the old days.

And the bottom metal channels for the doors have been made, and here he is checking the fit:

Frank Sirinek was painting the metal strips for the blinker doors on the Kansas City PCC: 

Lorne and Eric are checking out new parts for the ventilation system on the Cleveland PCC.  This will be almost entirely new construction when finished.

Dan Fenlaciki is an expert Mig welder, and he was fixing up a couple of parts for Tim (the steel channels seen above) and Roger Kramer (a seat bracket for one of the Rock Island cars.)  The arc is extremely bright, of course, so I didn't want to get too close.

Appearances notwithstanding, he survived the process just fine, I think.

Finally, although it's less exciting, we'll turn to what I was doing.  I finished up the truss rods on the 36 by attaching all of the brackets at each end, as seen here.  I'm thinking that the main reason for these is that if a pin were to break while the car was in motion, these keep the rod from hitting the ground or other stationary objects.  The rods aren't stiff enough to pole vault the car off the track, but there's no telling what they might hit or damage on the car itself, or its passengers.  I don't remember seeing these on cars from other lines, but they're easily overlooked.

I also want to complain that it was even colder inside the barn than outside.  Who do I talk to???

Inside the 319's vestibule, however, it got pretty toasty, so it was time for more sanding, and then painting.  Yes, I know, this looks a lot like Groundhog Day, same old stuff every day.  First primer on some sections:

And then first finish red on some other parts, mostly the ceiling:

And some second red: 

 That's all for today, but we have a couple of historical articles in the pipelines, so stay tuned!