Opening Day 2021

Frank writes...

Sunday was opening day, and it turned out to be a day with rather pleasant weather. There seemed to be a very good crowd, by April standards anyway. It was nice that opening day was in April - last year it was in July! The CA&E steel train and the 3142 were in operation.

I didn't get photos of the service cars, but here we see the 4410, which was one of two 4000's that spent time on the pit being inspected by Joel and Jack.

I spent my afternoon working on the 18. Here is the frame around the left / rear / exit door destination sign box. The steel around the edge is fairly deteriorated but that will all be hidden behind the window frame, which was removed last week.

Here's a "before" shot of the side sheet of the car near the front corner. You can see some "spots" where the paint has popped off, so those needed to be sanded and primed. The front of the car was repainted at the end of last year.

Car 18's split personality revealed: a bit of sanding revealed that underneath the "1218," which was applied by Trolleyville in the 1960s, was the number "18" that the car wore in its later Shaker Heights days.

After some sanding and wire-wheeling, the primer came out. Here's the destination sign frame.

Here's the rear end of the car. I only cleaned up the center panel, but sometime soon I can put Bankers Grey on this panel and then we will be able to reinstall the rear end marker lights.

This is the "after" view of the side sheet of the car, with bare metal spots sanded and primed. There's one area here that will need some Bondo and I will need to buy some of that.

After this it was back to the shop, where Richard showed me how to use the glass cutting machine in the wood shop. The whole reason for removing that destination sign frame was because the glass was broken when we got the car. The old piece is at bottom, the new piece at top. Thanks, Richard!

Besides that, I put a coat of paint on the back of the metal destination sign frame to help seal it up and put more grey paint on the marker light castings due to some unforeseen issues with the first coat. In other news, Zach was working on planing wood for doors for the 757, Richard spent a chunk of the afternoon repairing a mill over in the Steam Shop, Greg and Nick E were out on the railroad doing line work, and Jeron and Nick D were hanging around as well. A good time was had by all.