Sunday report

Frank writes...

Sunday was a productive day, though I didn't arrive until mid-afternoon. When I arrived, Joel mentioned that our air compressor expert had asked us to reassemble the 36's D3EG so that he could listen to it in operation. Nathan and Mikey did the lion's share of this work, I just helped a bit in tracking down tools. But it's back together and ready for its expert diagnosis.

I spent much of the afternoon working on the new ceiling panels in the 18, and I'm pleased to say that this item on the to-do list is now done. The panels are up, the ventilator registers are installed, and I put the bell cord straps back in place. At some point we will need a replacement light globe; we found a couple of spares that have just the right look, but they're a bit too small. I may install one of those anyway on the "better than nothing" theory.

I thought this was mildly interesting. At the back of the car, the bell cord is hooked to the wall using this cast brass hook. The hole through the hook is tapered, and a simple round-head brass wood screw is screwed in to hold the rope. It seems to work better than you'd think. Holes in the wall of the car suggest that the thing this hooks to - a little brass hardware-store hasp loop (not shown) - is not original, but I'm not certain exactly what hardware would have been fitted to the wall originally.

At some point I'll need to have some leather work done. One of the bell cord straps is hanging almost literally by a thread, having mostly parted near one end, and the strap directly over the conductor broke completely in two. Unfortunately in that case, we're also missing the part at the left end that screws into the ceiling, so we'll need to see if we have any of these bits in stock. These straps consist of two pieces of very thin leather sewn along the edges and sandwiching a thicker, almost square, piece in the center.

I also brought the old roll sign from over the 18's exit door, as well as the new roll sign we had made, over to the shop. I ran out of time, but one of my next tasks will be to fit the new roll sign material to the old rollers so that I can install the new roll sign. Then I can remove the badly damaged roll sign from over the entrance door for photographing and replacing.

And let's see what else is going on. For most of the day, Nick and Greg were working on decorating bi-levels for the upcoming Happy Holiday Railway event. There were other crews of volunteers working on decorating the depot and the diner annex. HHR has become an important event for the museum and a lot of work goes into making it happen.

Over in Barn 7, the Electroliner crew was touching up the striping on the newly-repainted interior of the A1 car. It really looks terrific, and a couple of reupholstered seats have been put in place either as a test or simply because they've gotten to the "final reassembly" stage. In other Car Department news, Joel spent most of the day working on getting the 4391 ready for service during HHR, while Nick and Greg are finishing up some initial prep work on one of our repainting projects. Stay tuned!