Progress on car 18

Frank writes...

Sunday was my first day out at IRM in about a month and fortunately I was able to make some reasonable progress on Shaker Heights 18. My twin goals for the day were, first, to complete re-installation of the #5 and #6 seats (the fifth and sixth cross seats from the front on the door side); and second, to do some cleaning and straightening. Here's the before picture.

Car 18 was almost entirely complete when we acquired it but a couple of portions of its interior had been disassembled by Trolleyville. One area was the removal of a large ceiling panel near the back of the car, a panel which will likely need to be replaced as it was left in the aisle standing upright and "settled" by cracking and splitting in several places. Another was removal of seats #5 and #6 and removal of the cabinet just inside the forward door, visible over the farebox. This had been done, I suspect, because the steel riser sheet under the cabinet was badly rusted out. The panel and cabinet having been replaced, it was time to put the seats back in.

I know, I know - you can barely contain your excitement! Fortunately the cushions for these seats were stored in the car. On the left transverse bar there's a hole in the center; on this car the seat cushions are bolted down through this hole and a hole in a metal bracket attached to the bottom of the cushion. That's different from CA&E practice, say, where the cushions just sit on the frame. Anyway, here's the after picture. It almost looks ready for service!

I swept and straightened the front half of the car and the drop center section but not the back half, where access is made difficult by that huge ceiling panel mentioned earlier taking up a good portion of the aisle. We'll need to decide whether we want to temporarily re-mount that panel or just replace it right away, if we can order a Masonite sheet large enough. I mentioned earlier that the car is almost entirely complete; one of the "almost" items is one of the seat panels on the center section bench seat, shown below. These are concave-profile bench seats so, while we actually got a couple of spare cushions for the cross seats, none will fit this location. Hmm.

I also took a couple of close-up shots of the unusual pattern on the car's window frames. While the interior paneling and trim all seems to be stained-and-varnished in pretty normal fashion, all of the windows have this odd mottled look to them.

The above photo was taken of the window behind the conductor's position; the below photo of a window across from the conductor. Both show places where the finish has been worn down to show a beige (or similar) color underneath the visible finish. This is an example of faux-grained wood, where the wooden window was painted with a light color then stained (with stain or thinned paint I suppose?) and grained to give it the desired finish.

A while back I read an interesting article here about using this process to give doors an oak look. Anyone ever seen an article showing how to reproduce the mottled look shown here?

Other than that, there were a few other people working in the car shop. Good Nick was working on cleaning up a magnet valve for CTA 4410's line switch. Above are shown a couple of tools used in this work; on the left is a tool sized for a group switch magnet valve, while on the right is one sized for the larger magnet valve used in the line switch. These are used to disassemble the coil and the one on the right was constructed just this weekend.

Joel continues his massive project to reconfigure the shop itself. Here he looks with satisfaction on the two test racks in the air brake room, complete with newly-built bench in between them. The 3T rack in the back is used to test triple valves while the 3UE rack in the foreground tests universal valves. Other equipment in the air brake room includes the recently-restored air gauge tester, which was used to calibrate the gauges on the 3UE rack, and the glad-hand installer.

And finally, from the Tim Peters Department, some freshly painted doors for the 1754. I assume these are train doors. This is one sharp paint scheme!