New Years Day Update

Frank writes...

On Sunday it was time to get the new year off on the right foot - with a trip to IRM, of course.

The project for the day was getting North Shore 160 running. One of its motors suffered an overheated armature bearing back in October, but Zach and the gang put a rebuilt motor into the truck on Saturday, so the task for Sunday was to hook up the motor leads, reconnect brake rods and slack adjusters, and test everything out. Here, Zach is in the truck working on motor leads.

And here's another shot of him working on bending the motor leads into position to hook into the car. Hopefully, one of these days we will be doing this job ourselves on the 308!

Brian, Mikey, and myself assisted with the various tasks, though Zach was the one under the car doing most of the work. After the motor leads were hooked up, the car was pushed onto the pit for brake rigging reassembly. Those are Mikey's feet dangling in mid-air... it may look like he's being eaten by the interurban car but never fear, he's just sitting on the truck frame.

Sunday was quite foggy at IRM; for a time, from Barn 4 I could barely make out the west end of Barn 2. The 25-tonner shown was used to get the 160 on and off the pit, since the wire has been taken down from the inspection pit lead.

Meanwhile, we retrieved half a dozen portable North Shore cab heaters from one of our CA&E storage areas (where they'd been for five years, since our first and last wintertime operation of the wood cars) for possible use on North Shore Line Day in three weeks. Two were good, four were bad, so that's not ideal. Richard, who earlier in the day was over in the bus garage painting pieces of historic rail for inclusion in a future rail display, spent a while getting one of these apart. The result is shown - in this case, one of the six coil-wound resistors was bad and would need to be replaced in order to make the heater functional. We had run out of time so we just reassembled it. Richard, clearly astonished, is on the right while Nick, as always, drops pearls of wisdom for the benefit of all present.

Zach and the other guys had pretty much everything on the 160 hooked up by dinnertime, and after dinner they got to work with some final lubrication prior to testing out the newly rebuilt motor. I had to head home, though, so you'll just have to stay tuned for the next exciting episode.