Thirty to Seventy for Seventy

It's now just thirty days to our "70 for 70" record-breaking trolley pageant, and since I have a small part to play in this extravagant extravaganza, it behooves me to hold up the side, as they say.  We have four restored wooden CA&E cars, and they're all pretty nifty appearance-wise, but there was at least one thing that needed to be fixed.  Handrails on the 309 were pretty ugly.

For a long time we have usually had one side of this car facing the public (south), and as a result the handrails on this side had lost a lot of paint.  People's rings and so forth take their toll.  So this seemed like a good time to take care of that.

With a combination of a wire-wheeler, a scraper, and sandpaper, it was fairly easy but time-consuming to get the rails down to bare metal.

And then paint them with white primer.  Ah, much better.

You also have to consider what they look like from inside the car, of course.

They will soon get a coat of finish grey.  Most of the other handrails are in pretty good shape, and I plan to touch them up as needed.

I've been on vacation visiting family the last two or three weeks, so a lot has escaped my attention.  But of course the others have kept their noses to the grindstone.  Here's an example of what Pete and Fritz have accomplished:

They later installed the red door on the car, and the electrical cabinet door is still in progress.

Among other things, the 306 has had its black stripe areas painted in preparation for the basic body orange.  I should have taken a picture of the folding doors that John has completed -- sorry!

A control problem that popped up with the 308 was traced to a blown fuse, and that was replaced, so we should be ready to run the four-car train.  The buzzer in the 319 has stopped working, and I looked at it, but was unable to fix it so far.  I'll keep on it.

Finally, we have exciting news from the Barn 4 extension.  Today concrete was poured for the post fittings of the extension.  Nowadays our barns don't have posts extending down into the ground where they might eventually rot out.  Instead, they are bolted into metal brackets set in concrete, as seen here.

And as mentioned before, the contractors have extended tracks 42 and 43 out as far as the extension will extend.  I don't know about you, but I can hardly wait!

And here's a picture from Jeron Glander looking west:

Here you can easily imagine what the finished building will look like.

 And of course as I always say, there was a lot else going on that I didn't get a chance to capture.  You just have to be there in person.