Sunday News

Frank writes...

The weather on Sunday was as beautiful as it had been crummy on Saturday. There was a lot going on.

One priority on the Shaker Heights 18 project right now is painting the seats, which will make the car's interior a lot more presentable. New volunteer Micah helped me bring eight seats, including two spares (one of which turned out to be unusable), into the "lean-three" for paint. Here he is cleaning them off.

And a couple of hours later, this is the result! Painting rattan seats takes a lot longer than you think it will, since you need to get paint into all those nooks and crannies, but the results are worth it. This is about a quarter of the longitudinal seat cushions in the car, so now we need to do the other three-quarters, plus all the seat backs, plus the various bench and nickel seats. I also tried testing the cab heat in the 18, but with no luck. That circuit may be open or it could be something simple like a bad fuse, I'm not sure.

In other news, I ran into Richard and E.D. Nick, and the subject of milk cars came up. The most unsung of our three milk cars is IC 100641, which was rebuilt into a water car by the GM&O later in its life, but we had never known what its original number was nor when it was built. The car happened to be sitting on Station Track 2, so Richard climbed aboard and did a bit of paint archaeology. And here you go! This car was originally GPEX 997, another General American Folderol car just like the "water bottle" (but about 10' shorter). That also tells us the car was built in 1946. So, that's one blank space in the roster we can fill in.

While we were messing with this, the service train sped past. Sharp!

What else was happening? Well, in the car shop, Bob, Mikey, Nathan and Brian were all working on Type M contactor parts for the IT Class B at one time or another. Nick and Greg were working on IT 415 (more on that later) and Joel was buzzing around on various department projects. Further afield, on my way in I snapped a photo of recent repainting work on our GTW 0-8-0, 8380. Kudos to the Steam Department folks, who have been making tremendous strides in recent years to cosmetically rehab our steam collection.

The front fell off! This F7A cab showed up a couple of days ago outside Barn 2. Contrary to rumor, it is not going to be restored and run on our main line. It will instead be adaptively reused as an immersive exhibit for visitors.

There was a lot of switching of electric cars due to repair work planned to take place this week in Barn 6. I observed that the North Shore has here "crossed the T" on the 409 over in Yard 6. Oops.

Ignore the diesel and enjoy the nice sunset.

Here's the 415, which is again the focus of a flurry of activity. It's still over in Barn 2 but is very close to being painted, with the paint and lettering masks already on hand and finishing touches on prep work underway. Stay tuned for more photos from this weekend of progress on the 415, the Pumpkin Train event, and more!