Today was most notable because we had a visit with friends of ours from the Northern Ohio Railway Museum. We've been cooperating with them on several projects, and traded parts, information, documents, rumors, innuendo, and we all had a great time. We'll probably have more information about some of this later. Meanwhile, we have a few pictures of various things around the property.
Before the visitors arrived, I had time to install the trap flap with the new hinge on the 309. Again, my thanks to the car shop experts who fixed it. It looks a lot better now.
I also worked on door closers for the 319, but nothing to take a picture of.
It's not often you get to see Gregg Wolfersheim in action!
One of the things our Ohio friends brought us was a set of special seats for the Baldy. The Baldies were built with center doors that were never actually used, and in front of the doors were folding seats. Here Bill is setting them up.
And they would look like this, with the door behind them. So this is a very valuable contribution to one of our ongoing restoration projects.
And then we gave them a set of recently-cast brake shoes for their Cleveland center-entrance car. Here they are staged on the grass while we load them carefully into the automobile. Can you spell "heavy"?
Frank will be able to tell you more about the brake shoes.
The Ohio guys were particularly interested in the 306, since they have Fox River car 303, which they will naturally be restoring in its Shaker Heights configuration.
John and the others continue to make good progress on the car.
And here they are discussing all the fine points of the restoration.
The contractors continue to make good progress on the Barn 4 extension. Today they were installing the gutters and drain pipes, among other things.
And a lot of other things were going on around the property, in particular, moving trees. No, I'm serious. Maybe next time we'll have more news about trees!
4 comments:
Will the new barn 4 extension be a heated restoration barn, or what other purpose will it serve?
C Kronenwetter
It will be a heated storage space. That's the official story and I'm sticking to it.
The first 66 Baldy 4000's were trailers with longitudinal (bowling alley) seating. At the same time 62 longitudinal motor cars were built. Both sets of car were designed with subway use in mind. They were built in 1914-15, long before Chicago had a subway (1943). Since they didn't plan to use the center doors at this time, they added collapsible seats in the center doorway. These could be folded down if/when the center doors were used.
On August 5, 1980 IRM was permitted to strip some parts off of bowling alley motor car 4083 before it was scrapped. Next to it was trailer 4043 which was also going to be scrapped. We decided to save the drop down seats for historic preservation. Later on Northern Ohio Railway Museum (NORM) decided to purchase this car, and subsequently IRM gave them the seats. NORM has decided to use the car for parts to restore other cars. So we asked for the seats to be returned.
IRM's Baldy 4146 was built in the second order. While it also had the center doors, it was delivered with two reversable rattan covered seats in the doorway. The 4146 will not be getting these seats. They will be used for display at some time.
Thanks for the correction.
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