Painting Progress

Frank writes...

Sunday was a chilly start to May, with temperatures hovering around 50 degrees. But unlike the last couple of times I was out at IRM, when it was a warm day that followed a cold day, the 18 wasn't covered in a slimy coat of condensation! So it was time for some sanding and painting.

The steel around the car's doors, which got needle-chipped last October and wire-wheeled in March, finally got a coat of primer.

And I spent a while sanding the left side of the car, starting from the back corner and working forward to the car's midpoint. After all of this was sanded, any spots with Bondo or bare metal received primer. I also primed some patched spots on the back of the car. I think I will want to do a bit more sanding in some areas, plus more Bondo is needed at the front of the drop section on this side of the car, but we're getting closer to having the entire car repainted from the belt rail down.

And, of course, more windows. These two windows received a finish coat of cream paint, so I should be able to install them next weekend. That will close up the right side of the car, which is the side toward the public.

I wasn't the only one painting. I stopped by the Hoffman garage when I arrived in the early afternoon, where Richard had the Connecticut Company bus just about ready for primer on the left side, as shown here. And then at the end of the day, I dropped by again...

...to find this! The left side of the bus has now received its first coat of primer, soon to be followed by a second coat, and then finish paint. The bus will have a silver roof, light grey along the windows, and dark blue below the belt rail, with metallic gold lettering. That should be pretty sharp. That hand off to the left is Richard pointing out one of the spots that needed some repair work.

In between all of this sanding and painting, I spent a little while helping Joel, Nick, and Greg excavate the north wall of Barn 4. Evidently a contractor is coming in a couple of weeks to make repairs to the north wall, so the "stuff" that has been piled there for decades needs to be removed. This was a neat find: a chalkboard stating that the "project for the day" on 4/23/1990 was to lubricate the center bearing on flat car E-117. So that gives you a conservative estimate for how long this particular "pile" has been here. Right behind the chalkboard is a door from the 763. So that's where I left that!

And here you go, the result of much of the day's work. Barely visible on the right is the 749, which was the regular service car for the day and was brought onto the pit after service so that Mikey could swap out of its slack adjusters for one he rebuilt on the bench.

And here's a sight to warm the heart of my physics professor father. After dinner, Doodlebug Bob held a class in the car shop to instruct Nick and Greg - who have taken over most of the DC Line Department tasks - in the inner workings of diodes and semiconductors. I've long felt that among IRM's real strengths is our institutional memory, and how good we are at passing along knowledge from the older to the younger generations. It isn't usually quite this formalized, though!