The big news for today was the flooding due to heavy rains yesterday. We've seen worse flooding in the past; it's something we can never completely escape. When I arrived at 7:30 this morning it looked like this:
The day's operations were cancelled, of course.
The main worry, however, is that Thomas is starting on Saturday, and the loading area for the Thomas train was under water. If we get much more rain before then, the Thomas event may not happen on schedule. That would be a real problem. Anyway, updates will appear on the Museum website as they become available.
But the water was slowly receding, and watching it doesn't help, so it was time to get to work.
As Frank reported, the car department resoaked the canvas over the weekend and placed it back on the roof of the 460. Their assistance is greatly appreciated. By this morning, it was pretty dry, so I rolled it out and started stretching lengthwise.
And the rest of the time was spent making repairs to the tack molding in various places.
Here we see what the canvas looks like after lengthwise stretching. The seam is nice and straight and centered. There are some obvious lumps, but these will all disappear once we start stretching lengthwise. I verified this by pulling, but I can't take a picture at the same time. To the right of the seam, you can see the row of bumps from the round-head screws for positioning the saddles. That will work just as intended.
The other shop regulars had their projects, most of which I didn't photograph. But here we see John painting the new trolley boards for the 306.
Meanwhile, Pete and Fritz continued painting the 160, Tim was working on the 1808, and Lorne was working on parts for the Cleveland car.
And here are some views of Bill Wulfert painting truck parts for the new motor truck for the 1754.
(Sorry that these are out of focus. My new cell phone has many unwanted features that can be triggered inadvertently. That's the price of progress.)
By 2:00 in the afternoon the waters had subsided to a degree.
And we can only hope we don't get too much more precipitation. If you have some time, you can look up the Rail and Wire for July 1978 to see how bad it could get years ago. Those were the days!
4 comments:
Randy,
I guess I missed something; why new trucks for the #1754?
Can you point back to a date entry that explains things?
Ted: Sure, Frank explained it here:
https://hickscarworks.blogspot.com/2020/08/sunday-update.html
It's only the motor truck that needs to be swapped.
The truck parts pictured above, are actually a set of gear pans for the WH567 motors that will be placed into the rebuilt Baldwin motor truck. When IRM purchased the 1754 in 1971, the CTA wanted to keep the WH567 motors as spares for the still in service 4000s used on Evanston Express trains. IRM was planning to buy the car without motors anyway, as the motors added too much to the cost of the car. IRM member Frank Jur decided to pay $800.00 - yes that much in 1971 dollars, so that the car could have motors. The easiest way was for the CTA to swap a Hedley truck with WH302-B motors in it. Those are the same type of motors used in the 1797 & 1808. The CTA also kept our Baldwin motor truck.
Now, as for the truck pictured in the Hicks link shown above, while the motors were fine, that Baldwin motor truck was in extremely poor condition; apparently poor when we got it under one of our 4000s that we scrapped. Luckily we had a better truck which had GE243 motors in it. So the GE motors were removed, and we presently have 2 GE & 2 WH motors in or outside of barn 4. The Baldwin truck was overhauled in-house, and the WH motors had some cleaning and insulating at the motor shop.
See Rail & Wire issue 251 (page 42) for the rest of the story.
Wow. Thanks, Bill, I didn't realize it was so complicated.
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