Building Blocks

Lots of things are happening at the Museum, as always, and right now the most obvious is the progress on construction of the Multi-Purpose Building.  Now that the floor is finished, work can start on construction of the fire wall and the front of the building.

We must start by thanking Northfield Block Company who generously donated five truckloads of concrete blocks for this project, and started delivering them yesterday.  Help like this makes a huge difference, and is most gratefully appreciated!!!

We hope to get the building closed up by winter, so work on the interior can proceed without interruption.

And next in the capital improvements is the inspection pit for the Steam Shop.  The concrete has been poured as seen here.  This is obviously designed for much higher axle loadings than our pit in Barn 4!

ARNfest will be here next week, so it's time for our annual cleanup of the Car Dept. shop areas.  This is a meeting for enthusiasts of old woodworking machines.  They help by maintaining our machines and the money funds woodshop projects.

So I helped with some of the cleaning.  And I changed out a retriever on the 309 which wasn't taking up the slack reliably.  This was exchanged with one on the 308, which won't be needing it anytime soon, unhappily.

As we saw last time, much of Barn 4 has been switched out.  Michigan Electric 28 is now at the east end of 42:

It's been in the "roof booth" for a long time.   The side looks like this:

And the S-105 is now in Barn 4:

Rich Witt continued to work on windows for the 109:

helped by Dan, a new member.  Meanwhile, of course, many of the other Car Dept. regulars were at work: Tim Peters and Frank Kehoe on the 1754, Jon Fenlaciki on the 65, John Sheldon on the 306, Chuck Meter and Lorne Tweed on the PCC, Pete Galyda on the 160, John Arroyo on the Liner, and so on.  I'm probably missing some.

Most of the time I spent wire-wheeling trap doors for the 451.

These had several coats of paint, some of which are bogus colors due to its time spent in the yellow and green paint scheme at Trolleyville. 

And here Bob Olson is grinding down a short piece of rail to be used as a template for the rail clips on the Steam Shop pit. 

 And as always, lots of other projects were going on, such as the Freight Car and Pullman Car groups.

This weekend, of course, will be Museum Showcase, aka Member's Day, and we'll have lots more pictures to show from that.  But of course you'll want to be there in person if at all possible!