Snowy Sunday

Frank writes...

It was another cold January day out at the museum Sunday, but there was plenty of activity.

The big news, of course, was the arrival of Pullman car Villa Real. It showed up Saturday evening around dusk to much fanfare; the above photo by Roger Kramer shows the car in its final minutes on the national rail network before being deposited on our interchange. ComEd 4, with Joel at the throttle, brought the car back to the museum. This car has been fully restored to its 1930s condition and was donated in outstanding condition, so keep an eye out for it on the coach train during special events. This may be our only car currently in public service that has sections, I'm not sure, though we used to run the Inglehome regularly.

But let's head back to the car shop. The focus of work was, again, on the 415 repainting project. I did a bit more sanding and also cleaned up the rest of the side windows on the car. Nick E and Nick D were working on finishing up wood blocking that will support the new dasher at the (current) east end of the car, and then before the light failed they went over and moved the 101 out of the barn for a paint gazing ceremony. Here, Joel the Eskimo holds up a metal drift card with a recently obtained paint match on it for comparison. The assembled viewers satisfied that we do, indeed, have the right color, the 101 was put back into Barn 8.

I also did some checking on the CA&E 450's in Barn 6 and put a little work into Shaker Heights 18. As shown here, a piece of sheet metal from the spares pile was cut and bent to shape for our new bench seat. This should now be ready for rattan, I think. And two more windows that were removed from the car a couple of weeks ago were stripped and sanded. One will need a bit of epoxy patching but then they'll be ready for primer.

And this photo of the 36's D3-EG air compressor contains absolutely no new information, because it looks exactly the same as it did a week ago, but appearances aside there is an update. Dan took the pump out to our air compressor testing station on Saturday and tried it out. The knock has been fixed, however it's passing oil (which it was also probably doing before) so the pistons will need a bit more attention. But it's definitely progress.