Sunday progress

Frank writes...

I was out at IRM again on Sunday and made some progress on Shaker Heights 18. The next step on the brake rigging project mentioned last week is obtaining some 5/8"x2-1/2" steel bar, but the first company that we tried couldn't do that, so we hope to procure that this coming week. In the meantime, I started working on the car's rear end marker lights. The car has two of them, side-by-side, and the design is poor enough (in retrospect) that it's virtually impossible to get at the light bulbs to test or examine them. You can see the design above: there's an outer cast housing held in with four bolts through the end sheet; then an inner cast ring held in with two machine screws that thread into the outer housing. The inner ring is supposed to be removable, so that you can take off the red glass (just flat glass, not a lens) and get at the bulb and fixture, but this is long since painted/rusted solid. Furthermore, of the 12 machine screws between these two fixtures, precisely one could be removed - the others were all frozen solid. So I drilled out the bolts and removed the entire casting.

Here's the view from inside the car with the back bench seat removed. The "tin can" metal housings are badly rusted and have large sections that are just gone due to rust. After removing the first casting (on the left in this photo) I also had to disconnect the wires. That proved to be pretty simple.

And here's what we ended up with, once the "tin can" housing was removed from the cast frame. This is actually after Richard removed, tested, and cleaned up the bulb, which was so dirty that I have no idea whether it would have been obvious at all whether it was on or off. Next up will be practicing our sheet metal skills to make two replacement housings. The cast frame, both inner and outer, was put into a can of "Evapo-Rust" to try and loosen things up, a trick that our guys learned from our friends at Halton County.

There was also some progress on the 453 project. I went out to the "pole car," one of our storage cars where we keep spare trolley poles and other ephemera, and returned a spare trolley base that we can use for the 453. We have a couple of trolley bases of this type in the "pole car" which I think may have come from Trolleyville.

As the trolley bases are multiplying, so too are the trolley poles themselves. Where a week ago there was one trolley pole here in the Lean-Three, now there are three. This is courtesy of Greg, who wire-wheeled two poles for the 453 and also put a new harp onto a pole for the 36. So I primed the two 453 poles and touched up the existing primer on the 36's pole. All three are now ready for silver paint.

While I was on a painting kick, I also finished the first coat of black on the signal box that we found with the Trolleyville stuff early in the year. It could probably use a second coat of black but we'll take a look. Either way, as soon as it's done, we will hand it over to the signal display guys if they are interested. If not, it will probably end up hung on a barn wall as a display somewhere.

What else was happening? There were a few people around working on a few different projects. The big one was disassembly of a second 4000 motor truck for the 1754. The first truck was found to have some frame cracks, so this one will be used instead. A crew of guys including Dan, Joel, and Greg (shown above), plus Nick and Richard, worked for much of the day on totally disassembling the truck. This involved taking out the traction motors and breaking the truck down to its basic components. Above, they're working on freeing up a journal box frozen in its pedestal so that the truck frame can be lifted off of the wheels. By the end of the day this was done and the frame, wheels, springs, equalizers, and truck bolster were all separated. The 1754 still needs money - right now it needs funding to pay for motor work so that a pair of motors can be rebuilt and the car can enter regular service. Send in your donation checks today or donate online here!

This photo was taken in my kitchen before I left for the museum, but it shows several boxes of photos from the Stephen Scalzo collection that I've spent a few weeks sorting and cataloging. I've got a couple more boxes to do, mostly buses and foreign stuff, but the American traction photos were brought back to Union and returned to our secure storage site. There are some 10,000 prints in this collection and that's just the 4x6's and small snapshots. Keep an eye on the blog in coming weeks and months for more articles like these.

There was more going on too: Tim was out for a while working on the new ticket booth for 50th Avenue, which is coming along impressively, while Thomas and Ashton were working on wall installation and painting on CTA 4146. The drive-through Christmas even was also running smoothly and we saw good attendance numbers for the event on both Saturday and Sunday. Remember to tell your friends!