Roof In Red

 On the roof of the 460, we just keep rolling along.  I started by making a new piece to replace a rotted-out section of tack molding at the west end.  This piece needs some more work at home, then it will be soaked so it can be slightly bent.  I also cleaned out all of the old wood in the place where it will go.

Then I painted most of the roof, using a roller.  As you will have noticed, the roof boards were never painted by the railroad, but we think it's a good idea to help preserve the wood under our conditions.  To save money, we generally use old paint that isn't much good for anything else.

In this case, with Tim's help I located an ancient gallon of Pittsburgh's Carnival Red.  This is a color we used on the 309 back in the seventies, but this particular can had never been opened.  It might date to before the fire, since they were originally planning to keep the 309 in the final red paint scheme.  Be that as it may, it was a little lumpy and skinny but that makes no difference for this application.

Actually, it's almost beautiful.  Too bad they didn't actually paint the roof canvas red to match the rest of the car!

The scariest part of the process is running the pneumatic paint shaker.  Stand back!

After using up that gallon, I found a can of reddish-brown paint.  It doesn't match, but again this will all be covered so it doesn't matter.

And then I spent more time applying the rest of the plastic shields and epoxying the tack moldings.  Not much to take a picture of, however.

And other guys were hard at work, but I didn't get a chance to photograph them.  Tim was working on the 1808, of course, and Pete and Fritz on the 160.  Steve Iversen and Frank Sirinek were also there, as well as Dave Conrad, Victor and Bill, and I don't know who else.