Tuesday Progress

 It was another nice day at the Museum, and we continue to make progress while following all the guidelines for a safe, happy, and healthy work environment.  Doesn't everybody?

As usual, I continued work on the roof of the 453.  I made two more boards for the southwest corner patch, and after some adjustment they look like this:

I then mixed up some epoxy, a combination of liquid and solid as recommended by our in-house expert on such things, and installed the two additional layers.  The lower one is attached with C clamps as seen here:

And the upper layer is put in place and held with two small sledge hammers as weights.  I can assure you they didn't get any spare epoxy on them.  The next step will be to nail what's left of the curved roof boards into them.

Tim continued his work on the various parts for the new 50th Avenue ticket booth.

John was working on the 306 also, mostly on getting all of the heaters ready.  I should have gotten a picture of him testing them with his VOM, but I was too busy.  I really don't know how well that was going -- I believe he met with some resistance.

Be that as it may, I spent some time investigating a known problem with the 453.  The coupler at the #2 end is missing some parts, most obviously the hook, as I'll call it.  I looked at it some more, and I don't believe the coupler is damaged in any way, it's just missing some parts.

I believe this probably happened when the four St. Louis cars were being moved to Cleveland; they removed parts so a towbar or some sort of adapter could be used to pull the train.  This certainly happened before 1979, as I have a picture of the 453 with the coupler in this condition.

At the other end, you can see what it should look like.

We have at least one spare Tomlinson coupler, with "431" marked on it in chalk.  But it has a different sort of uncoupling mechanism.  It's hard to explain in words, but apparently the 450's have a different arrangement than the earlier cars.

I went out along the road to look at our spare coupler assortment.  I didn't find anything usable for the 453, but I couldn't help noticing this tight-lock coupler, now one of our newest interests.  The cast-in letters obviously indicate this was produced by Van Dorn, right here in Chicago.  And there are lots of others.  Who knew?

Well, back to work.  At the southeast corner, the tack molding was partly rotted away.  Obviously it has to be replaced.  So I started on that, with a hammer and chisel.

It took much longer than expected, but having begun, there's no turning back. Finally it was done:

And Tim had a block of poplar from an earlier project of his, so I cut that to shape, more or less, and took it home for processing on my router.  This should be the last major project on the roof structure.

Stay tuned for further developments!