What's Missing?

Actually, there were several things missing today.  Most of you will have no problem noticing what's missing in the picture above.  Several heroic members spent a week of vacation time to make this civic improvement project possible.

But beyond that, anything like spring warmth and light were missing.  It was cold, damp, very windy, and dreary all day.  When I arrived, Mike Alterio was working as seen here, under the most awful conditions, to finish up welding the bonds so the streetcar line can be put back into service.  

You don't have to look far to see where the missing baggage cars have gone, however.  Three of them are on Station 2 on their way to the south yards.

The lightweight was moved into Yard 5.  This will become a Car Department storage facility.  We have a couple of decrepit semi trailers, one of which is seen here, which will be reloaded into the baggage car.  And as you can see in the foreground, there won't be any immediate shortage of spare parts needing storage space.

The other thing that was missing when I arrived was electric power!  Electricity is one of those things, such as health and freedom, that one doesn't fully appreciate unless they're no longer available.  So we sat around and talked for a while.  But Joel was able to find something for me to do: we're trying to put together several new first aid kits so that essentially every regular service car can have one, and we don't have to worry about making sure there's at least one on each train.   I put a coat of plastic primer (and I didn't even know there was such a thing) on a couple of plastic tool boxes, as seen here.  Painting in the dim light is somewhat haphazard, but this isn't restoration work we're doing here.

When finished, they'll look like this:

Com Ed was at work on the problem, and shortly before noon power came back on.  I spent the rest of the day doing inspection work on the 308, and finished up everything that could be done in the barn without having the car over the pit.   Such as the controllers: 

And the contactors:

And the air system, and so on.  No serious problems were found, and on Wednesday I hope to put the car over the pit to finish it up.  Inspection, inspection, ... you haven't heard the last of this.

Jeff Brady continues to work on floorboards for the 28:

Tim is planing and sanding the tack molding and letterboards on the 1754:

And Ed and Eric have finished up installing the ductwork in the Cleveland PCC and are ready to start putting in the wiring.  All I can say is that this is not at all how wires are installed in wooden interurban cars, and a good thing too!

Meanwhile, my fellow bloggers have gone missing.  We can only hope to hear from them soon....