Here's a report from Saturday. The Museum was as busy as ever.
In property news, the MPB is now surrounded on the north (open) side with plastic sheeting, and blocks have been staged on the scaffolding, so I'm expecting work to continue soon on building both the interior firewall and the front facade.
On the 451, I got the third trap door installed and adjusted.
The remaining trap door is badly rusted, so it will need to be rebuilt. The metal piece that wraps around the outside edge is beyond saving.
So with some work, I bent it up, but it's still held on with about ten rivets that need to be ground off. Then we can have a new piece fabricated.
And in electrical news, I got the buzzer working and got the buzzer cord attached correctly at both ends. It appears that there's an open in the wiring to the main blower motor, but that is not a high priority. We can do without the blower for a while.
And I started looking at the traction motors. From a purely visual standpoint, they look fine. It's difficult to get under the car, so I will wait until we can put it over the pit for actual testing.
And of course the Happy Holiday trains were running. You will notice that the bilevel train has something new: a fourth car!
This is one of our more recent acquisitions, another C&NW gallery car still in Metra paint.
For those of you playing along at home, this is C&NW 25, built by Pullman in 1956 as part of the second order of cars for the North Western. Most of the interior was stripped out by Metra before it became available, so it cannot be restored to its original configuration. But there are several possibilities for special use on trains like this. For now, it's serving as storage for extra supplies, and as a resting place for Santa.
The upper level floors and seats are still there, but the stairwells were removed, so they can only be accessed by stepladder. A lot of work has already been done to make sure that the HEP power works and is transmitted to the rest of the train.
One of the next tasks will be to modify the entrance so that the car will be wheelchair-accessible. That has been a problem with the bilevel cars. We are reluctant, of course, to make major modifications to one of the complete cars for this purpose, but it's important to be able to handle wheelchair users.
And I'm told we have two more cars on the way, from the third North Western bilevel order.
And Dennis Bockus sends us a picture of this generator on a piggy-back flatcar:
The reason for this is explained in a comment by Bob Olson. Thanks, Bob!
And Pete has done a beautiful job on an interior door for the 160.
And finally, a public service announcement: there are five, count 'em, five more Happy Holiday Railway days coming up, and we could use more help. Jim West is standing by to take your call!
4 comments:
The generator on a flat car, GOFC, is to provide 480 HEP for the bi levels should the HEP fail on the BN-3. The HEP failed on the CNW 411 last weekend prompting concerns that we have a backup HEP source to protect the service should BN-3's HEP fail as well. Hopefully, we won't need to use it.
I didn't know that any of the six window cars got Metra silver paint. Was this one of the buybacks from VRE? Looks like they recently painted it and started overhauling it before deciding to stop work and cannibalize it for other cars.
Is the generator a rented one, or could it be used to provide backup power for the depot and the food building (for the refrigerators at least)?
C Kronenwetter
The METX 7658 was a complete car when it was sent to California Ave, and then to M19 for storage. All the seats, interior panels, and anything missing is from squatters and scrap thieves during the time it was stored at M19. Metra did buy it back from VRE and put fresh paint on it, but it never went back into service.
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