Today's report will be mercifully brief. The weather was dank, dark, dreary, well, you get the idea. Not many people showed up for the car cleaning party, but I went ahead and worked on a couple of my cars. And taking pictures of glass before and after cleaning seems particularly pointless, so I don't even have many pictures to share. Sorry.
But to start, here's something interesting: a complete set of new castings for the window guards on the Indiana Railroad 65 have been made. Here are a couple of them:
Jon is naturally very proud of these. This will make a significant difference to the car's appearance when they're installed.
Anyway, I spent most of the day cleaning windows and sweeping the floors in the 36 and 308. There were also a few minor other tasks that needed to be done: for instance, I needed to reconnect the buzzer cord and install the window shades inside the #2 vestibule of the 36, as these had been removed for painting. Here are some interior photos of the two cars.
It's an interesting trivia question as to how many panes of glass there are in any of these cars. For the 308 (above), I believe the answer is 110, but I could be wrong. For the 36, it's more. And for the 309, it's a lot more. And each pane has two sides. Of course, we don't bother to clean the clerestory windows, for instance, but it's still a good deal of work. And for relief, I installed the cover on the junction box that had been wired up last time. Whew!
Anyway, public operation will be starting soon, and that's the reason for all this labor. Be sure to invite your family, friends, neighbors, and random strangers to come out to IRM this summer to ride. There's no place else quite like it!
3 comments:
Did you take these pictures with your small camera? I can't seem to enlarge them when I click on them. Bill W.
Did you need to clean all the storm sashes on the 309? It is a rare car that is has all of those intact for storage, on the car, instead of in a pile in some shop (and never preserved).
1) They were accidentally shrunk too much. That's been fixed.
2) Very perceptive question on the 309. The storm windows are stored in the up position, and are made difficult to release so they won't accidentally fall on somebody. So no, I never bother to clean them. And I haven't got to the 309 yet anyway.
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