Tuesday Travelogue

 Today's Tuesday travelogue takes us on a terrific tour of the territory with typical technical tidbits.

OK, enough of that...

What's the Buzz?

My main project was to fix the buzzer on the 319, since we'll need it for the big parade.  In this first picture, we're looking straight up at a narrow space in the ceiling, where the interrupter and buzzer are mounted as inconveniently as possible.  The resistor built into the interrupter was burned out, so I replaced it with a new one several years ago, the bright yellow object at the top of the picture.  In service, you'll never notice it.  I was afraid it might have burned out, but it's still OK.  

Instead, I found that one of the connections had come loose and was producing an intermittent short.  I was able to fix this and reassemble the interrupter, although since you're looking and working straight up it's a real pain in the neck.  But it went pretty quickly.

Finally, it worked!  As you can hear for yourself:

And I would call this anticipation:

I spent much of the rest of the day sorting and cleaning parts in storage.  But not all...

A Jewell In the Rough

This is the Jewell Road waiting shelter from the CA&E, and while it's in rough shape, it's basically complete and restorable.  So Frank and I have been looking at it with an eye to at least doing a relatively quick cosmetic job.  And the standard red and grey CA&E paint scheme will be very striking.

There are no definite plans for it yet, but I'm sure we'll find something.  We always do.

Dave Diamond put a new roof on it a few years ago, so it's holding up.  I might start on it as time permits.  But first, we need to evict all the wasps!

Also, we're having trouble locating a good picture of this shelter when it was in service.  In particular, I'm not sure the windowless front door it has now is correct.  Can anyone help?

Have Sand, Will Blast

Over by Barn 13, a contractor was hard at work sand-blasting our C&NW big hook.  Jeff Calendine happened along and told me about the project, of which he's in charge.  Once the sandblasting is done in a day or two, painting can start.  And then he wants to do the same job on the idler flat.  It should look great, and we will have a fully functional big hook.  Mostly, I hope, for demonstrations and not for cleaning up actual wrecks!

306 Teamwork

Quite a few people were at work on the 306.  Besides touching up the painting, they're hard at work on getting both brake valves functional.  These are more complicated than the ones on automatic air cars, as it happens.  So they had Gerry, Paul, Phil, Norm, John, and I'm not sure who else.

Next door, Tim is installing the canvas on the 1808.

I like how he has the canvas stretched with straps through the car:

And in the shop, Gregg was making more parts for the roof structure on the line car:

The roof is going onto the barn extension:

Tanks a Lot

While we're here, let's take a look at some model trains for a minute.  Here are the before and after views of my latest project, an AF wide gauge (standard gauge) tank car.

You know, when I first saw one of these, I remember thinking it looked pretty ridiculous.  Real tank cars don't have proportions like this.  Just typical toy trains....

But then today, I happened to notice this car sitting outside Barn 3.  And I must say this has much the same proportions as the toy.  The arrangement of the platforms is different, to be sure, and of course the paint scheme, but those are details, relatively speaking.  IRM is always educational!