Frank writes...
I was at the museum on Sunday too. Originally I was going to be conductor on the wood train, but plans change and I ended up spending the day in the shop.
I started out by putting a coat of Bankers Cream on another four windows for the 18. Three are seen here in the shop. On my next visit these will get put in the car.
Next up was more surface prep on the 18. This is pretty interesting: when the side sheets over the rear truck on the right side were sanded down, it became obvious that four different numbers could be made out: 1218 on top, applied by Trolleyville in the 1960s; under that, two very slightly offset versions of 18, applied by Shaker Heights when the car was painted in grey/yellow in the 1950s and in later Bankers colors in the 1940s; and lower down than the rest, an older 1218, presumably applied by Cleveland Interurban Railroad in the 1930s or early 1940s. For the time being, these will all still be there under the paint.
After completing the work of sanding down the side of the car aft of the doors, I took a wire wheel to the rear end of the car on the right side. What I thought was just some surface rust popping through the paint turned out to be a series of pin-holes in the end sheet just over the dasher. Bondo to the rescue. Lower down, towards the bottom of the dasher, there's some real rust jacking and I want to needle-chip that before trying to use body filler at that spot.
Here's the right side of the car after being washed down and spot primed. Next time I'm out, hopefully, this will get painted grey.
As it was getting close to dinnertime, I also drilled and tapped the two additional 3D printed latches we ordered. These will get installed on the 308 to hold the end signs up. They'll just need some plastic primer and then they, and the first one we got printed (visible top left) for the 309, can be painted blue and installed.
Dinner was a cookout, courtesy mostly of Joel Ahrendt and Thomas Slater, so a huge thank you to them and everyone else who supplied food. It was delicious, and I got a chance to yak for a while with Nick Kallas and with Dave Conrad, who is in town working on the Ingersoll-Rand engine. Hey, we need help: Dave is looking for info on GE 840G traction motors, specifically how much they weigh. If you know, drop us a line. But anyway, one of the car shop regulars, Jack, is shipping out to serve in the Air Force so Joel baked him a cake.
But let's back up earlier in the day a bit and see what else is happening in the shop.
How do you know the car is not quite ready for revenue service? The first clue is the "if you open this door it will break the air system" sign. But never fear, once an air strainer of the correct type is sourced this particular issue will no longer be a problem. Other challenges included stuck brushes in the MA set and at least one balky relay. But sometime around 10:30pm, the car ran!
A couple of test trips back and forth on the pit lead, towing car 1630 (not motoring but with brakes fully operational), were made. They even let me run a trip!
And finally, just a bit of railfanning: the CA&E wood train returning from its last trip of the day as the Shay and its caboose train departs from Station Track 1 to short-turn at Car Line Junction and head down to the south yards.
12 comments:
Frank- On Monday evening, we got Metra 1630 running again as well, and it and 1637 ran again as an MU pair.
R. W. Schauer
Nice to see the Highliners running again. I hope we can see them running a little more often in the future once we get their teething problems ironed.
-Matt
Did the Highliners need any rewiring to be compatible with the 600v museum system? IIRC, the 803 needed a 600v compressor.
-T. Rich
Next we will have to determine how many heavyweight coaches the substitute 1630 can pull.
I'll write at some length to answer the questions you've posed, and a few more.
- Running the Highliners, for the medium term, is going to be a special-occasion thing. This is partly because of the cars, and mostly because of the overhead.
- The cars are suffering sitting outside. Anyone who rode the cars on the Electric knows they were rusting to pieces. We chose the best cars we could but they're not close to perfect. We've applied tubes and tubes of caulk to the seams on the roofs, and have seemed to stop most of the huge leaks they had; now it's down to the smaller ones. They need to pay for their track space, and then they can start raising for indoor space. The cars are too tall to fit in Barn 4 over the inspection pit, so any work on them is done outside. (Barns 13 and 14 are built to 17 foot clear under the trusses, and subsequent barns will be too. There won't be a problem there, once they can go inside.) Working on them is no picnic. We are maintaining them the best we can, given a million other priorities.
- The overhead has two distinct problems for use with pantographs. First is the wire, or rather its location over the track, and second is the hangers, pulloffs, and specialwork (frogs, etc.)
- The wire isn't always centered over the track because that rich Illinois prairie soil that the farmers love, is crummy for holding poles steady. You have to put lots of anchorage down there to keep them still. There are sections of the mainline that are pretty bad; a lot of it is as it was built. We straightened some poles a couple of years ago, but every winter it gets worse. It's easy to fix, just dig down, hold the pole in the right place, and fill it in and tamp it. Easier said than done, and harder to find the time to do it! On the property, it's the same deal, with the added complication of more stuff in the air. Highliners are extra picky about centered wire because they have narrower pantograph shoes than most other equipment.
- The hangers and specialwork are mostly intended for use with trolley poles, and don't play well with pantographs. This is not a deliberate thing to exclude them; most railroads around here were perfectly happy with their trolley poles and any compatibility with pantographs was a "happy accident". Changing out specialwork and pulloffs that just won't work is possible, and we need to do that. Adding pan jumps (wires at the sides of, and lower than, something that can't be touched by the pan shoe, like a frog) is also necessary. But the entire overhead needs to be tensioned enough to stay cross-level, and this means more pull on the poles. See the previous paragraph! This is an eminently doable thing; Western Ry. Mus. at Rio Vista is an excellent example. But they have stable soil that doesn't freeze hard.
(continued in part 2) R. W. Schauer
(part 2)
- 803 had a battery-voltage pump, which ran off one of the MG sets. At 600 volts, this was not really very workable, and tended to cause a lot of burning at the commutators. Thus a 600-volt pump was added.
- Highliners are largely 230 volts AC three phase, or 64 volt battery, for their auxiliaries. There is a big MA set under the center vestibule (remember the vibration when you were standing there?) which generates the AC. Everything that uses it is intended to accept widely variable frequency (down to 22.5 Hz) and somewhat variable voltage. The MA set spins pretty fast, for being fed less than half normal voltage; it's "in regulation" as we're running it because only the volts-per-hertz is what's regulated, for the benefit of induction motors. It's enough to run the air compressor and the blower fans, but not enough for the air conditioning. The battery charger on them (a solid-state thing) is somewhat feeble on that voltage, but I can do something about that. We are considering the practicality of a bit of field shunting for the motor side of the MA, to speed it up. As for what's been rewired, one wire was moved (reducing potential-relay resistance from 20k to 10k, for the curious) and one relay was plugged (although I might change a resistor for that one). That's it. Says something about the resilience of good old DC electric traction, doesn't it?
- Although an MU car is technically a locomotive, the brakes and couplers aren't really set up to haul coaches. Sorry, Randy.
R. W. Schauer
Just wild a.. guess here Mr. Schauer. Based on the CSS 803 schematics Randall posted, reconnecting its M-G set's 1500v system series motor field coils as a parallel set of 750v system poles in series with the armature would weaken the fields. Would that then require the motor to resume spinning closer to rated speed in order to make the necessary back EMF? The overall current would of course increase. This is not relevant to 803 now but would such a thought help the Highliner MA sets?
Bill West
Bill- Interesting idea. I went through the MA wiring diagram and the GE schematics and it does appear that it's a possibility, although it would require tearing the MA set apart. I always worry about insufficient field current in motors causing the potential for flashover on startup, but with the size of this thing, it might not be a problem.
R. W. Schauer
Is there a resistor in series with the motor of the MA set? If not, adding one might help prevent problems. I know that the old IC cars have a resistor in series with the compressor for that reason. Of course, adding a resistor would require some engineering, but I know you guys are up to it.
For that matter, I've never quite figured out why our standard 600V compressors don't blow themselves up every time the governor closes. I guess we're just lucky.
Wow. Thank you for the beyond-detailed response. I struggle a little with understanding some of the finer points on the electrical systems, but it's clear that adding "modern" equipment to the roster will present a few challenges in the coming years.
-T. Rich
RWS & Randall -Thanks. All I can offer as a counterpoint is that we would be starting with 40% of the design voltage so the volts per commutator bar and the initial starting current are much less. RWS's point about machine disassembly however is significant for us poor volunteers :) .
Bill West
Randy- Yes, the Highliners do have a 2.45 ohm permanent resistor in series with the MA motor, and another 4.9 ohm starting resistor that's bypassed after 4 seconds. To answer whether shorting out the permanent resistor would speed the MA up even more (after the 4 seconds expires), we tried it. The answer is no, not perceptibly. Didn't figure it would; the motor was running without much load at that point.
The answer to why compressors that are dropped on the line without resistance don't go into orbit is that it's the field excitation that keeps things stable. This is also related to why field shunt resistors on equipment that uses them, like PCCs and the like, are inductive. Think about what happens when you're rolling along at a good clip, in full power, and the trolley pole crosses a section insulator. At the moment power comes back on, the motor fields, being inductive, will retard the flow of current while flux builds back up. But if the field shunts were not inductive, the lion's share of the current would divide through them, leaving little for the fields. This is an unstable condition (high armature current with little field current) and can cause a flashover, especially as the motor is already spinning fast. Inductive shunts force the division to follow the total impedance, not just the resistance.
R. W. Schauer
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