Annual Meeting 2021

Frank writes...

I was out at IRM on Saturday, for a change, because it was the date set for the 2021 IRM Annual Membership Meeting. As with last year's meeting (which was in September), it was held outdoors at the Central Avenue Pavilion. Fortunately, as with last year's meeting, the weather was nice.

The usual congratulations and condolences to Jason Maxwell, who was reelected, and to Zach Ehlers, who was elected to the board for the first time.

I then spent most of the afternoon working on inspecting the 309, doing brake adjustment and checking the motors. I needed to clean some gunk out of the comm on the #4 motor, which has had the least amount of attention of the motors on the car (#1 and #2 were totally rebuilt in 2003 and #3 was extensively cleaned up by IRM volunteers in 2006), but other than that things seemed pretty normal.

I did put the four newly-painted windows for the 18 in the car and brought four other windows back to the wood shop, though I didn't get a chance to paint them. In the above photo, the middle window is one of the rebuilt and repainted ones. Many thanks to Richard and Joel for their help with getting these painted!

Tim Peters was in the 2872 so I got to take a look inside the car. He's already started removing some of the more deteriorated wood from the outside of the car that will be replaced.

Tim found this fascinating relic in the attic at the west end of the car, over the platform ceiling in the end of the monitor roof section. It's the Chicago Daily Tribune from April 4, 1921. Tim's supposition is that this was probably the date that the car's roof was rebuilt and its roof-mounted headlights were removed.

We haven't been posting a lot of updates on Michigan Electric 28, but the crew working on that car have been making steady progress on the front end. The dash panels and various metal trim pieces have mostly been riveted back together at this point. It's really starting to look like itself from the front again.

And in case you were wondering, when comparing Type M systems, most of them seem to have the control resistors mounted to the contactor box - on the DB-131 they're on the back of the box, on the DB-260 they're on the end of the box - but on the pioneering DB-15 system the control resistors are mounted in their own box frame next to the motor resistor grid boxes. Here it is. So now you know.