Rolling along

Frank writes...

After a very enjoyable holiday I was back at the museum on Sunday. When I first arrived, the only person working in the car shop was Bill, but Nick E was off working on the bucket truck and Tim had been there earlier while later in the day Joel and Greg showed up. So it turned out to be a pretty busy day. My first priority was to get our reproduction roll sign mounted in the 18.

Success! Well, sort of. The crank doesn't work, so for now it's stuck at TERMINAL. The pot-metal gears are missing some teeth and the shaft of one of the rollers seems bound up. But at some point I'll tackle that. In the meantime, it's a vast improvement over the broken glass and tattered roll sign that had been there. Speaking of tattered roll signs...

This is what remains of the second side roll sign, the one over the entrance door. Ugh. The four lines are LOCAL, EXPRESS (I think - it's completely gone), STATION, and SPECIAL. Thanks to Bill for his help getting this unrolled. A lot of the sign just disintegrated, particularly that missing destination that I suspect was EXPRESS. He pointed out that with these signs sitting in a little box with its own heater - the light bulb - they'd vulcanize badly over time. Perhaps the fact that the center-door cars were used in rush hour express service for their last decade or so is related to the EXPRESS line being so badly damaged. Anyway, we will work on getting this sign reproduced and then mounted back in its box. The gears in the entrance door sign box seem to be in better shape but, again, the mechanism is bound up and won't crank. Hmm.

One thing I'd like to do over the winter is bring as many of the car's side windows as I can into the shop and repaint them. These are the first two; the one on the left appears to have been rebuilt at some point in Cleveland, possibly even at Trolleyville, while the one on the right was made by my father a year or two ago but the glass cracked. Greg helped me find a new piece of glass, though we'll need to cut it to size, and I took the glass out of the other window before heat-stripping and sanding it.

So here we go. Next weekend I should be able to put a coat of Bankers Cream on these two windows and then they'll be ready to go back into the car. So what else is going on around the shop?

Bill is still working on the GG1. With the cab pretty well cleaned up, attention has turned to the engineer's seats, all of which had been pretty badly damaged by time, weather, and raccoons. Bill was epoxying the four seat frames shown here so that they can more securely be screwed to the metal mounts (one is visible at center-right). These will be reupholstered and then reinstalled in the locomotive.

The motor for the 36's D3-EG air compressor is looking pretty sharp. Here we see the armature, with the motor frame in the background, sporting a fresh coat of Glyptal insulating varnish.

And Tim is making good progress on the 1808. Here we see a rebuilt side door with a varnished interior face. The second side door undergoing rebuilding is beyond it. In other news, Joel was working on coiling and stowing extension cords from the holiday event and replacing light bulbs in the big fixtures in Barn 4 (among other things) while Nick was working on repairs to the bucket truck.