Compressor In Place

The Museum was busy on Saturday, with a test opening for visitors limited to members only.  This was mainly to provide a dry run for operations with all of the pandemic-related restrictions in place.  Somebody who was actually involved can probably tell us more about how things went, but apart from rain in the early afternoon it seemed to go smoothly enough.  And there were several shop projects in progress, as usual, which I didn't get any pictures of.

In the morning I was able to change out the roof fuse box on the 451, replacing it with one in good condition which we had in stock.   Below, before and after:

And when permanently installed, it looks like this, with the usual strange green glow:

But the main project was installing the newly-rebuilt compressor on the 451.  This was not a simple project, and among other things we were greatly helped by being able to borrow a small forklift from the Steam Department.  Here Joel is bringing the compressor on a pallet up to the front of track 41.

Most of the time I was too busy to take pictures.  But during a lull in the action I got to make a test installation of one of the frames I made for the roll sign box.  The red doesn't quite match, and it will of course need another coat, but we will have several things at each end of the car that need repainting in the correct red.

Besides help from Joel and Richard, special thanks goes to Jeron Glander and Jeff Calendine, who did most of the work in actually getting the compressor into position.  It took longer than expected, but in the end the compressor is mounted correctly.  I hooked up the electrical connections and tested it briefly, and it worked well.  The air piping is not yet complete, so I wasn't able to pump up the car, but that will happen next time.

So that's a major step forward in getting the car operational.