Monday, July 30, 2018

Miscellaneous Monday

Today was another nice day.  We seemed to have a good crowd of visitors, and various things were happening.   Thomas and Percy were loaded up and went their way.  But they'll be back next year.

There are always little tasks to be performed.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the blue warning sign was missing from the #1 end of the 36.  It was still in storage, so I finally got around to installing it.  Not a big job, but every little bit helps.



Ah, much better.  Then I worked on the controller at the #2 end for a while, and retested the control system.  Everything seems to be working OK.  But I started wondering just what these controllers would sound like when shutting off at the head of an eight-car train.  I guess we'll never know.

The wooden frame for holding the 150's Kevin sign was coming apart, so I spent some time rebuilding it in a sturdier fashion.  It also got cleaned up.


Let's take a break and look at the roof of the 1754.  Not surprisingly, it looks great.  Just a few details, such as the trolley hooks, need to be completed.



And on the way back down, we see parts of the clerestory window hardware.


And the roof structure:


As Frank mentioned in an earlier post, there was a missing shutoff sign in Barn 8, so I made two new ones and installed them.


All of the barn tracks have an insulator just outside the door.  Ideally motormen will shut off before any trolley pole crosses the insulator, in order to avoid drawing an arc.  It's difficult to judge when to do this, so on track 84 we have these nifty signs.


"Off 1" is the point at which the motorman should shut off for the first car when the front of the car reaches that sign, and so on.  On a two-car train you also shut off at "Off 2", and so on.  Car 36 is shorter than the others, so if the 36 is already inside the barn you need to shut off about five feet earlier, or half a bay.  If that doesn't make sense, it's time to turn in your badge.


 Transport Extravaganza is this Sunday, so be sure to tell your friends and neighbors.  It's the biggest old-car show in Illinois.

3 comments:

Ted Miles said...

randall,
Good for you for taking care of the Kevin signs; they sure have a great deal of information on them! I understand he is not longer around to take care of them.

Ted Miles

Anonymous said...

The posting above appears perhaps to contain links to a number of non-railroad websites.
C Kronenwetter

Randall Hicks said...

Sorry for the delay in removing the spam comment. In the meantime, I think we can all usually recognize spam and avoid clicking on any links.

Until recently, Frank and I would get email messages whenever anybody posted a comment to the blog. This enables us to respond quickly to remove spam, or just answer a legitimate question. But a bug in the Blogger software has cancelled that feature, so we don't get the emails anymore. They say they're working on it. All the other bloggers are mad about this too, including Frank with his PNAERC blog. So we appreciate your patience.