It's good to be back

Frank writes...

As the state of Illinois progresses from Stage 2 to Stage 3, it has been authorized that employees and working volunteers may return to the property to commence maintenance and other ongoing work. The museum is NOT open - for the foreseeable future we are still closed to the public, and in fact we are closed to members too unless they are working volunteers. If you're a volunteer and want to help, make sure to contact your department head to get assigned a date and time you can come out. There are also a variety of rules in place about social distancing, wearing masks, etc. But despite the "not quite normal" aspect of all of it, it's definitely good to be back.

So progress has resumed. The above photo shows a new coat of white primer on the belt rail of Shaker Heights 18. Last year, when the car was still in Barn 13, I had sanded down much of the belt rail of the car. Most of the paint on the car is in reasonably good shape, specially on the metal portions, but the paint on the belt rail was mostly falling off. So this is an improvement.

This car has drop windows designed to be stowed away in pockets in the walls. Like the Matchbox, for instance, there are little hinged covers that serve as the interior window sill and cover the windows when they're stowed. Except that it doesn't work that way any more; when Shaker took the window guards off of these cars in the mid-1940s, they blocked the wall pockets so that the windows only drop halfway. So when the windows are open you get the slightly unorthodox appearance shown here. In other news, I also removed and plugged off the under-floor air line to the trip cock. That system was only installed on car 18 near the end of its service life and won't be appropriate for its target restoration date of about 1945. As a single-ended car, the 18 only had a single trip cock mounted to the back of the front truck, so fortunately it was a pretty simple system.

The B&G guys have been hard at work. The north side of Barn 3, facing the playground and also recently re-skinned I believe, now has this newly renovated sign.

And what's going on with the depot? Well, this is part of a project to have the building professionally repainted, and these windows are being closed up to try and conserve heat in the building during the winter among other things. I was told that this will henceforth be a solid board-and-batten wall, which will actually be returning it to its original appearance since this was the freight station end of the building and it didn't have windows at this location until the depot came to IRM. In the background is the 604, which was doing some line work on Station 1. For most of the day there were a few volunteers on the 604 out on the railroad catching up with some deferred maintenance on our overhead wire.

He may look like a bandit trying to steal motorman's windows, but it's actually Zach test-fitting a rebuilt window in the end of the 757 with help from the disembodied hand of Brian L. Zach was working most of the day on getting these windows ready to install; once in place the 757 will be fully closed up for the first time in a number of years. Other projects in the car shop are seeing progress too including painting roof boards for CA&E 451, various fixtures being installed on the 1754, painting on CTA 4146, and progress on the Fox River Electric car as well.