Friday Update

A brief report on Friday's activities:

In just three weeks it'll be Memorial Day weekend, and we plan to have a three-car wood train in operation on Monday, May 28th.  So mark your calendars now.  The consist will be the 319, 36, and 309 in that order.  I put the train together and checked the operation of the brakes and control system, and everything went well after a couple of adjustments.  It could only move a few feet, but that's probably enough for now.  Since the 36 is in the middle, we can test things without a working feed valve, but it would be good to have it adjusted.  Unfortunately, there's no good way to take a picture of the train while it's in the barn, but it will look as good as ever.  Like this:

Meanwhile, Tim was turning out huge quantities of tongue and groove boards to completely replace the roof on the 1808.  Here we see him running them through the table saw.  Each board requires three or four passes.  And you'll notice he was putting the Berlin sander to good use.

And Norm was cleaning up the various parts of the 306's line breaker, as seen here.

The interlocks:

Back in Barn 8, I disconnected the motor leads to the #4 motor on the 308.  I'm hoping we can pull both motors out of the truck sometime soon.  (The car has only two motors, but they're at the #2 end, so I'm calling them #3 and #4.)

This one appears to still be functional, and it probably just needs to be dipped and baked.

And I checked the contactors on the 36 and 309.

Finally, Gregg was working on the 1702.  Here we see him inside the car, painting the carlines with primer.