Prime Time

Frank writes...

The weather on Sunday was as warm and sunny as it was cold and rainy on Saturday. I spent most of the afternoon in the smoker of the 460, completing the task of painting the walls with primer.

We are now ready for blue-grey paint! The doors in the compartment aren't being painted at this time - the bulkhead door can more easily be done later on the bench and the paint on the equipment closet door is in good shape, so I figured it was worth leaving original. I also opened up the new can of paint we got a few weeks ago and painted a drift card, which we compared with the square of original paint visible on the wall that had been preserved by virtue of being behind the first aid kit. We were quite pleased with how close the match is.

Afterward, I set up a makeshift spray table in the "lean-three" and put some primer on the underside of the baggage racks that my father hadn't been able to access. (Thank you to Nick and Greg for helping me extract these from the 460 when I first arrived so that I had room to work!) We'll check these to make sure we didn't miss any spots, but as long as we didn't, the next step is to spray them silver. Many thanks to Cliff and his son Nick for doing all of the wire-wheeling to clean these up last weekend!

In other news, Bunny Trolley Hop seemed like it went smoothly. In the car shop it was a quiet day: Nick and Greg spent much of the day working on improvements to the substation, and Bob was working with Tom on something for the Steam Department, but there wasn't anyone else around.

One curious and fortuitous development came to light when I got home: I had an inquiry from Dan F. asking about Holland trolley bases. If that rings a bell, you've got a good memory - we found one of these oddities a couple of years ago in a bunch of random parts we received from Trolleyville. As it turns out, we need two of them for our Tri City Railways car! So it's quite fortunate that we have one, but we're still on the lookout for a second. Know anybody who's got one they don't need?