Diesel Daze

Frank writes...

I was at IRM on a Saturday this weekend, for a change, and it happened to be the first day of Diesel Days. Lucky me! I get to see diesels!

Above, just before the Parade of Power (why don't we have a cool name like that for the Trolley Parade?), the E5 with the Zephyr sits on Station 1 while UP 1848 and a caboose train sit on Station 2.

And the BN U30C, out of service at the moment although I'm not exactly sure why, was on display on the turntable leads alongside the two C&NW Dash 9s. A pair of modern UP "Heritage" units was also on loan and on display on the west wye. The weather, by the way, was gorgeous - mid-70s and classic Kodachrome skies much of the day.

So when I wasn't drooling over the embarrassment of dieselized riches to be had, I was working on Shaker Heights 18. Above is the former site of a badly rusted-out steel plate just inside the forward door (note that the car has only two doors, at least not counting the motorman's cab door). The door is to the right; to the left are the steps from the drop section in the middle of the car up to the floor in the front half of the car. I chipped some rust off of the framing members at this location and wire-wheeled off the surface rust in preparation for primer.

The car is over in Barn 13, so on my way back and forth on various tool-gathering missions, I observed Dave, Al, Jerry, and Tom working on getting a new sign installed on the east end of Barn 11, as shown above.

And in other sign news, above is a new addition to the Barn 4 workshop in the pit area. The CTA sign apparently came from the old West Shops complex, formerly the biggest shop for the Chicago Surface Lines and now still a workshop for the CTA. West Shops was where the CSL built a number of its own streetcars in the 1920s.

So here's the replacement piece of steel being test fit. A few minor adjustments are needed, plus I need to drill some holes where this piece will be bolted to the framing members. But definite progress is being made.

By later in the afternoon, the Buildings & Grounds crew had completed installation of the sign shown above. Barn 11 is known as the Milwaukee Road barn (half of it is, anyway) since the Milwaukee Road Historical Association has assisted financially with some of our recent barn construction.

And to finish out the afternoon, Richard Schauer and Greg Kepka helped me by meggering the motors on the 18. This is the first step in testing the electrical systems on the car and involves measuring how good the insulation on the motors is. The car's four motors meggered at 300k, 200k, 350k, and 600k ohms (motors #1 through #4 respectively) which is not great. We will try and dry them out using a light bulb left lit inside the motor case and see if the numbers improve. But none of the motors was grounded, so that's good.

And here's a shot of the 1754 showing more of the recent work by Tim Peters. He was hard at work on the car, as usual, and a few other people were working on projects in the Car Department as well. Eric and Ed were making progress on the Cleveland PCC, Bill was cleaning out the CTA "Baldy," and Buzz was doing window post work on Sand Springs 68. There's a lot happening!