Diesel Sunday

Frank writes...

The weather on the Sunday of Diesel Days was mostly overcast, with some occasional light showers moving through. But those were mostly gone by mid-afternoon and there was plenty to keep me busy.

The first task was to gingerly peel off the vinyl masks and see how the roll sign painting went. The results look great! A huge THANK YOU goes out to Tim Peters for spraying this black on Monday, despite the can of spray paint I'd provided proving to be defective.

Here it is with all of the masking removed. In addition to Tim's help, this was made possible by Buzz, who designed the vinyl masks, had them printed, and showed me the application process, and by Bill, who sourced the sign material. Thank you!!

Fast forward a bit, and after dinner I picked back up with working on the sign. Here's the remnants of the bottom half of the original sign, all ready to have the material removed from the mechanism.

This photo is mainly to remind myself how "wide" the roller is. Once taken apart and cleaned up on the wire wheel, I'll need to put it back together at the same width or else it won't fit correctly in the sign box.

I was able to get the old sign off of the roller, take the roller apart, and take the little clips off of the old sign material. For whatever reason, this car uses these little folded-over metal clips instead of a metal rod. I got the clips reinstalled on the new sign before I ran out of time. 

So what else was going on? First, we are looking at sending a GE 66 motor out to get a quote on rebuilding it for the 308. So I opened up the storage container where we have our four spare motors (two from the 309 and two from the 318) and meggered them. None was very good, but that's the point of rebuilding them. Donations are still needed to get the 308 running again!

And then I spent a while helping Joel, Zach, and new volunteer Jacob on a cleanup project in Yard 4 east. There are plans to rebuild tracks 42 and 43 east of the barn, which means all of the storage cars there will need to move. These cars haven't budged in about 25 years for the track 42 cars, maybe longer for the cars on track 43. So we set to work cleaning out a lot of stuff that was stored underneath those cars, some of which went into better storage locations and some of which went into scrap bins. Above, a couple of axle cap bearings so badly worn down that they were partly gone, with the material reduced to a knife edge. Eh, a little bit of babbitt and they'll be fine...

In other news, I stopped by the trolley bus barn, where Richard was cutting new rope for CTA 9631 after having repainted its trolley poles. He pointed out that it wears a nice new CTA emblem, shown here. Our other two Marmons are on the left side of the photo.

Our Buildings & Grounds Department is always coming up with something new and interesting to add to the visitor experience, and this spring one of the highlights has been the addition of a "whistle post garden" in the median of Doug Oaks Boulevard between Barns 3 and 4. Until a couple of years ago, this area was home to a tumbledown display of telephone line construction, but that was only tangentially related to railroading and wasn't very photogenic. This new exhibit allows us to put a pretty impressive collection of mile markers, whistle posts, and property markers on display.

Joel pointed out the latest addition, this exceedingly rare obelisk from the St. Joseph Valley Traction Company, and supplied these last two photos.

It's accompanied by this very nicely done historical sign. You may recall that the St. Joseph Valley Traction Company was covered in the latest issue of Rail & Wire, along with a myriad of other fascinating subjects. What? You aren't subscribed to Rail & Wire as an IRM member? Well, what are you waiting for?