Winter Wednesday

Welcome to April here in Northern Canada Illinois!  It's cold, windy, and there's snow on the ground.  I would have liked to continue painting the 308, but at least I got a chance to turn the car around.  Here it is out on the tail track, showing the side that has not yet had the grey repainted:

And these two photos show the other side.  There was even light snow in the air, and at one point during switching I had snow blowing through the vestibule from side to side.   No accumulation, at least!

But otherwise the operation went fine.  The rebuilt air gauges seem to work very well.   There was an air leak at the connection for the brake pipe on the #2 gauge.  I tightened it up which reduced the leaking, but didn't stop it.   So I disconnected it, reset the gasket, and tightened it up again.   The leak seems to be gone, but we will keep an eye on this.

One other thing that struck me is that the #2 end was still missing a grab iron, to the right of the motorman's position.  You can see the screw holes in the wood below the wiper handle.  It's been that way ever since I rebuilt this end back in 2002.  The grab iron itself must be one of those parts that went "missing" at Noblesville.  And this seemed a good day to take care of it.

So I hiked out to my secret stash of spare parts and found just the right piece.  This is probably from the 318, so it's been in storage for about forty years, and it's time to put it to good use.

After cleaning it down to bare metal, and trimming one end as required, it lines up almost exactly with the already-existing holes:

With a coat of primer, it will be ready for blue paint next time.

(Photo by Jeff Brady)

Jeff provides helpful advice to Pete Galayda on the new door for the Class B.

 Meanwhile, he continues work on flooring pieces for the 28. 

And also in our nice heated shop, Tim was working on the 1754, Jack Biesterfeld and Bob Olsen were working on windows for the 109, Jon was working on the 65, and so on.  Scorning the comfort of a heated indoors, Bob Olson said he was planning to go out to Johnson Siding and replace some ties.  By himself.  I was tempted to inform him that he must be insane, but decided to keep it to myself.  Who am I to point fingers?  It's good to know you can keep a secret!