Wednesday Report

When will winter ever end?  Fortunately this morning it was dry, so I was able to run the 308 to Barn 4 and put it over the pit to complete the inspection process.

Directly behind the 308 is this temporary heated setup around one end of the Vera Cruz open car.  Tim set this up so he could repaint the dash panels on the car.

Inside it's pretty cramped, but you can see that he's done a very nice job of painting.

There are lots of things that need to be checked during inspection, but let's look at the motors this time.  From underneath the car, we remove the access plates to look at the commutator.  You will notice that this commutator has a bite taken out of it.  This must have happened at Wheaton when the motor was being overhauled.  The armature would have to be lifted out of the box frame, and they must have dropped it.  The defect was then carefully smoothed out.

As a result, though, we need to trim the brushes down so they don't ride over the missing part, and as a result the wear pattern on the commutator bars is not optimum, but there's not much we can do about this.  The motor has performed just fine in service at IRM.

Looking up at the other motor, we see the dipstick used to check the clearance between the rotor pole pieces and the bottom stator field pole.  All is well, indicating that the armature bearings are not being worn down.  That would lead to disaster.

And from the top, we check that the brushes are properly tensioned, nothing is loose, etc.  Everything appears to be OK.

I would have liked to do the lubrication, but the weather wouldn't allow it.  So that will be left up to the department regulars.  Only the roof and the lubrication remain to be completed.

Here in the shop we see Jeff Brady talking to Dave Conrad, who paid us a visit during his road trip around the country.  Dave is now retired, so he's putting in a lot of effort into producing a second edition of his famous directory of North American steam locomotives.  I'll probably buy a copy if I can get it autographed by the author.

Meanwhile, outside it started raining and sleeting, and the roads were covered with ice.  Yucch!

Gerry has to make his way out in the awful weather to get new cylinders of acetylene and oxygen.  There seems to be a problem with people not returning the empty bottles.

Ed Oslowski continues work on the Electroliner.  Today he had a visit from representatives of Adlake, who will be producing replacement window shades for the Liner.

Gerry is fixing up the coupler chains for the 1754.

While Tim continues work on the replacement window sill, and many other parts.

Since the open car has been moved over to 41, we get a better view of the 1754.

Finally, I brought out the replacement window lever I made at home.

It actually works, more or less.

So I cut out another piece of wood to produce a second one.

Next up: Saturday will be the Annual Meeting day, with the rules review, safety meeting, rules test, and lots of other fun activities.  Stay tuned!