Frank writes...
Business had me in Pittsburgh (again) this past weekend, and of course that meant that I was (again) down at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington to darken the door of Bruce Wells and the other volunteers there. The usual progress was being made, with their dump motor in the shop for work and some ongoing maintenance chores being performed on West Penn 832.
Their Shaker Heights PCC car, shown above, has acquired a coat of yellow paint since I last saw it. This is a cosmetic restoration, at least for the moment. They are working on reattaching the floor-level rub rail on this side of the car and new glass has been obtained for the narrow opening sash in the right side motorman's window, among other tasks. One question that has cropped up is how to remove the window sash. This car has the same type of windows as does IRM's Cleveland PCC (another Pullman product) but it's not obvious how the windows come out of the posts. Anyone know?
And Artie Ellis, one of PTM's resident volunteer machinists, was working on machining armature bearings for motors from their Rio open car. These motors had been cleaned up but not totally rebuilt prior to being put into service, and this summer a strand or two of the waste got into one armature bearing and tore it up a bit. So new bearings were procured and are being machined to fit precisely onto the armature shafts. We rarely do motor work like this at IRM and it's definitely impressive to see in action.
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