Happy New Year

Frank writes...

Happy New Year from all of us here at the blog! Sunday I again headed out to the museum, after I cleared my driveway of snow of course, and picked back up with the 18 window project. It was an unusually quiet day; when I arrived, Tim, Bob, and Greg were in the shop, but Tim and Bob left pretty quickly thereafter. (Fortunately Tim gave Greg and me some pointers on glass cutting - thank you!)

Many thanks to Greg, who spent much of the day helping me with the windows. We got a new piece of glass out of the "glass box" and brought it in to warm up - Tim recommended not cutting cold glass, so that's a good tip to know. Then we retrieved two more windows from the 18, brought them in, took out the glass, and stripped and sanded them. One of them needed a little filler, so we did that as shown above.

And the other one was in better shape so it got a coat of primer, shown here. I know, I know - fascinating stuff. What can I say? In the meantime Greg cut a new piece of glass and we installed it in the replacement window frame, so that's ready for finish paint too. Some little screws we had procured for the glass retention sticks turned out to be garbage so we'll need to get different new screws for those, but it's not urgent. (Hardware store these days often sell screws that seem to be made out of pot metal - Bob Bruneau would always refer derisively to this material as "compressed buffalo dung.")

There weren't many people on the property, but Richard was over in the Hoffman Garage working on the ConnCo bus acquired from MOT back in 2015. Greg, Gregg (who stopped by), and I went over to visit. Richard has begun repainting the bus in as-delivered blue and light grey with a silver roof. One side of the roof has a fresh coat of silver, shown here, applied before the weather turned really cold (which happened over the course of Sunday afternoon - it was about 25 degrees when I arrived and about 6 when I left). And on a related subject, work on CTA trolley bus 9631 at the contractor in Elgin has slowed because they've been inundated with rush jobs, but they are still making progress as they have time and are now working on matching the CTA dark green paint.