Solid Progress

 Time for another Wednesday report, and we have solid progress to report in several places.

First of all, maintenance of the physical structure of the Museum is a never-ending struggle.  Today, the B&G department had a couple of contractors working all day replacing the roof over our historic O'Mahoney diner.  This is an important artifact that needs to be well preserved.

In the car shop, here Pete is applying a nice coat of varnish to an interior door from the 160.

Larry Larson continued to bring us parts of the Van Dorn Company archives, which he has been donating.  Here are some boxes of copper printing blocks, ledger books, and so on.

And also a large, heavy pattern for an anchor casting, I believe, now temporarily stored near the front of the shop.  We really appreciate the donation of historic artifacts like this!

Tim was cleaning up the ticket window grill from the ticket office in the depot.  Round trip to Milwaukee, please!

Finally, I was able to make some solid progress on the 453's roof.  I finished the woodwork on the patch for the Trolleyville hole at the #1 end, and started applying the solid epoxy to smooth it out.  It usually takes several hours to set up, so you basically get one application per day.  But it's looking good, if I say so myself.

And at the #2 end, there was some more solid applied, followed by more sanding.

I also worked on the tack molding at a few places around the car, mostly the northeast corner and the #1 end.  

Also the #2 end:

Also, Pete briefly helped me measure the locations of the screws I placed earlier for the saddles.  It appears that the original saddles were not perfectly aligned on the center of the car, but off by about ¾" to 1" (to the north, as the car is now sitting.)  That was probably thought to be within tolerances, but I'll keep it in mind when the new saddles are finally installed.