Spin the Wheel

Yes, friends, it's time once again to try your luck on Spin the Wheel!  IRM is certainly a social organization, and if we as a group can't decide where to eat tonight, we now have this handy wheel of fortune to decide for us:

Speaking of games, it's been a long time since I had a set of Tinker Toys, so today I spent a while happily putting together some of the Museum's vast collection of half-inch pipes.  And Joel suggested I should submit this as a contest: the first person to guess what this is actually for wins fame and adulation!

By the way, there's an interesting mathematical theorem involved: because there's a closed path in the above system, a union is unavoidable.  But anyway....

That's enough fun and games, let's get down to work.  The PCC truck which is being prepped for use under the Cleveland PCC has gotten lots of attention.  Here Ed Woytula is working on it, and he, 

Eric Lorenz, and Chuck Meter have been putting in long hours to make sure it's in top shape.

John Arroyo is finishing up one of the last ceiling panels for the Electroliner.   Soon they will start to be installed in the car.  And while there have been delays, reassembly of the train is now scheduled for June, I'm told.  Among other things, it can't take place any sooner because the roads are posted until sometime in late April.  Your patience is appreciated.

The 431 was switched out today, so the 409 could go over the pit.

As seen here:

This car was flagged for sharp flanges.  We have made it a policy to be more strict on the condition of wheels used in regular service.  I must admit, in the past it was more a matter of banging on the wheels with a hammer and saying "Yeah, that looks good enough to me."  But we have a lot of members who work on regular railroads, and it would be good to adopt the same standards for wheel profiles.  In this case, the solution is relatively easy: the car has its brake shoes replaced with special profile cutting shoes, as seen below, and then run until the flanges are within spec.  

And so the 409 should be cleared for revenue service again this year.

And in velocipede news, which I'm sure you're all eager for, Buzz was hard at work on the lathe, restoring or making new parts.  We're lucky to have skilled workers of all sorts available.

In this picture, you can see one of the new parts he started making:

And speaking of spinning wheels, I was in an inventive mood and started making a sanding block mechanism for the new wheelset we'll need for the 36.  We've talked about this before.  This should be an improvement over the previous system.  It's upside down in this picture, but when complete it will enable us to sand down the bearing surfaces efficiently and safely.  And you'll see it here first.