Wednesday report

Frank writes...

I was out at IRM for a few hours Wednesday afternoon. Most of the reason for my visit did not have anything to do with car work, and in the end I didn't end up doing any car work at all.

First off, something tangentially CA&E-related. We had a print shop make up reproductions of a bunch of CA&E bulkhead advertising posters so that we can sell them in the gift shop. They finally let us know that the posters were ready, so I picked them up and dropped them off at the gift shop. I don't know whether these will be on sale during the still-being-planned Christmas event, but they should certainly be on sale by next year. Plan your interior decorating accordingly. I should also say a big THANK YOU to Ray and Julie Piesciuk, whose high-res scans of posters in the Julie Johnson Collection made this print run possible.

And then I met up with donor Larry Larson again; he had donated the Van Dorn company materials a couple of weeks ago that we've been posting and he showed up with an even larger haul this time. I brought home a bunch of things to scan, so there will be more Van Dorn posts in the near future, but some of the items weren't really scanner-appropriate and are shown here. These include large-format images, ledger books, and blueprints. There were also a few more wooden patterns, a couple of printing plates, and even a handful of glass plate negatives. There's a lot of great stuff here.

You may recall that back in June, as noted on this very blog, we found this manually-activated line-side signal in one of our storage cars. I think that it came to us along with the other Trolleyville spare parts we acquired in 2010 (there's a bit more historic info on it here). Anyway, for the last four months it has been taking up space on Joel's bench and he pointed out that it really needed to leave one way or another. Since I was the one who had helpfully suggested that it would make a neat-looking display piece, I figured I'd better do a little actual helping out. So I wire-wheeled off what remained of the old paint. For the record, this thing was originally (or at least earlier) painted black, and at some point later was painted kind of a dark forest green, though not an olive-y Pullman green. It appears that, both times, the handle sticking out the bottom was painted the same color.

And here it is, ready for a quick wipe-down and some paint. Hopefully the next time I'm out I can spray this with primer and then it can get a finish coat of either black or green. Of course, if someone else is hanging around the shop bored and happens to be in possession of some primer... just sayin'...