451 Progress

Frank writes...

On Sunday I took a break from the 18 and joined with a few other department volunteers who were working to move the 451 project along. It was a good day and progress was made on several fronts. One major advance, which I didn't get any good photos of, was that the electric cable from the west bus jumper socket up through the vestibule attic to the roof was mostly replaced. Joel and Richard were able to accomplish this, soldering a new quick-disconnect fitting onto the rooftop end and then splicing the new length of cable onto the cable coming out of the socket. This completes the circuit that joins the two bus jumper sockets and then goes into the rooftop fuse box shown in Friday's update.

Another bit of good news is that Joel was able to get the leak plugged in the oil sump of the 451's air compressor. Like the 453 and 460, the car has a DH-25 pump (shown above) but it had a small crack that didn't affect the pump's operation directly but leaked oil. This is now fixed and the pump is almost ready to be put back on the car. The next job is to find the little steel cover that goes just behind the coffee can in the above photo; this was removed at some point in the last year or so and has been misplaced. I tried a couple of examples off of spare DH-25's but the hole spacing is a bit different. One way or another this won't be a tough problem to fix and then we will be able to put air on the 451.

Then the next item on the agenda was trolley poles. After measuring the poles on the 460 and the trolley base locations on both that car and 451, Joel determined that a pair of matching poles that have been leaning against the wall in the southeast corner of Barn 4 for a number of years are, indeed, the poles from the 451. At some point probably 8-9 years ago these were cleaned up, painted silver as befits a CA&E pole, and new harps designed for trolley shoe inserts were fitted. Jack hunted down S-hooks and "crazy eight" split links, Joel found a new shoe assembly to put on the one pole that was missing its, and the poles were hoisted up to the roof. Above, Joel is tightening the adjustment nut on the west pole. We really didn't tighten these much, so tension on the poles is very low, but the nuts holding them into the bases were torqued down so we can adjust tension later.

And here's a view of the pole at the east end of the car. Beyond the 451 on track 41 is North Shore 160.

And here's a shot of the west end of the 451 following installation of its pole. Joel is up on the roof with Richard in the vestibule. You can see that I was also able to install a retriever on this end of the car, pulling one from our "working spares" pile. It's also evident that the poles on this car are a bit shorter than you'd expect, with the very tip of the shoe barely even with the rope guard. The 460 is the same way. But looking at photos, I think that's correct. This picture from the Trolley Dodger site shows the 451 around the target date of its current restoration, with original lettering but after the roof was painted black and after the as-built metal door sash were replaced by wooden windows. It's obvious that even with the pole hooked down, the rope from the retriever "bends" back over the rope guard. The only real difference seems to be that originally the rope tied directly to the harp, instead of slightly back of it on the current poles. (For whatever reason it looks like the car also had a short length of chain below the harp - not sure why the railroad would have done that.)

As always, other projects were being worked on too. The most noticeable when I arrived was that Thomas had extracted the Baldy from the track 42 "roof booth" for the first time in a year or two and had taken it over to the pit lead for a pressure-washing.

Thomas is up on the scaffold to the left of the car cleaning a couple of decades of dust and dirt off of it. Most of the exterior metal work is done, and at some point the car will get a fresh coat of paint to match the new paint going onto its interior. The car did motor itself out of the barn, MU'd of course to a car with poles. Later in the day, Thomas and Jack were working on checking out the car's under-floor equipment to chase down a pesky wiring short that had cropped up. Good Nick and Greg were also out and hard at work overhauling overhead wire hardware.