Progress on Many Fronts

As usual, we have progress of many different sorts to report today.  First of all, perhaps you can see that the Lean-3 is a lot cleaner than usual, and most of the usual activities have had to move elsewhere to make room for Arnfest, which starts tomorrow.  That's good, not only because it makes money for the Museum, but because a yearly cleaning never hurt anybody.   Or so they say.

I spent most of the day repainting the other side of the roof of the 309.   Here you can see some before and after pictures.  This process requires dragging the scaffold back and forth, climbing up and down and up and down and so forth, but it's all good, healthy exercise.

Next, I'm sure you want to hear about progress on the Electroliner.  There are three articulated joints between the four units, and they all seem to have problems.  The design includes a cast "bowl" as well as two complex side bearings.  One of the bowls was broken into pieces, another had serious cracks, and the third we couldn't even be sure about because they're covered with lead paint, grease, and other unpleasant substances.  This needs to be cleaned up before we can proceed.  IRM has always been committed to protecting our environment.

Avalon Rail, the contractor for rebuilding the trucks on the Electroliner, arranged to have all the hazardous substances removed by a subcontractor, Integrity Environmental Services.  Here we see Gregorio, an IES employee, in the process of cleaning things up safely.   He has all the necessary equipment and protective gear to do the job correctly.  It may look like he's on fire, but that's just his reflective safety vest caught by the camera flash.

The job should be finished by Monday, and then all of the various parts can be analyzed to see what needs to be done.  So the Electroliner is making serious progress.

And then, Gregg Wolfersheim is busy doing a cosmetic restoration of our SP/T&NO #975, a 2-10-2.  This is a daunting task, but he has already done much of the running gear and is working on the smokebox and front of the engine, as you can see.  He's spraying a grey primer, followed by gloss black.

Some of the wheels on this side are still in primer, others have finish black.

All the wheels on the other side are black.

This is an impressive locomotive, and this cosmetic restoration will be a tremendous improvement.

But wait, there's more!

Thanks to another generous donation, we now have all the money we need to start the 309 bearing project.  I still need to make some adjustments to the patterns, and check a few things with Bob Sunderlin, our machinist, but we are ready to have the castings made soon.   So our gratitude goes to everybody who helped out, and of course we'll keep you informed on how things are going.  It should be exciting!

By the way, somebody asked me why the Old Woodworking Machines convention is called "Arnfest".  Well, that's easy.  It's because of the material all these old machines are made of: arn!