Toot, Toot

Frank writes...

A few of us were able to team up and get some stuff done on the 18 on Sunday. The first, albeit not necessarily most critical, item was to put a new whistle on the car. Scott Greig pointed out that a lot of Shaker Heights cars in the 1940s-1950s had Ohio Brass three-chime whistles on them rather than normal Westinghouse "trombone" whistles. These OB whistles were used by the Lake Shore Electric and other Ohio interurbans, but we don't have any equipment in operation at IRM that uses them... until now!

We tried out a couple, and new volunteer Steven posted some video on YouTube - tell us which you prefer in the comments! Either way, the car will have another distinctive aspect about it the next time it emerges from the barn. In arguably more constructive news, Zach figured out that to clean the air compressor bottle valves - a job that could use doing - we'll need to contort ourselves a bit, but we won't need to remove the pump from the car. With luck, we can get the car switched onto the pit again at some point to do this. And then Steven spent quite a while working with me on unbolting all of the seat cushions from the frames. I'd like to repaint the seats, as most of the paint has worn off and a fresh coat will make the car interior look a lot better, but these seat cushions are bolted to the frames with a single bolt. That job was annoying.

As always, there was a lot going on. Zach and Steven spent much of the day working on the 749, which had a minor motor failure during Showcase Weekend. I say "minor" because the motor didn't ground out; a wire to one of the brush holders came loose. Unfortunately, one of the insulators was no good, so a replacement was called for. Above is the old brush holder, while below is the new one from stock after Steven cleaned it up. Thanks to Steven for sending in these two photos as well as the whistle video link!

Joel, Nick, and Greg were all hard at work on various projects, while Bob was continuing his efforts to rebuild the contactors for the Class B. In the meantime, the bus guys were putting everything away after a very successful Bus Day. Below, "Bus Steven" (on the left - not to be confused with new volunteer Steven mentioned earlier) has just shoehorned the Seattle Twin Coach back into its spot in the Andersen Garage. Richard is in the photo as well - two points to whoever can find him first!

Perhaps the highlight of the day, certainly in terms of how unusual it was, was the dinner trip to Culver's. This is one of our regular haunts for Sunday dinner, but we don't usually get to ride in a London double-decker bus. However a bunch of us piled aboard for a trip to Huntley courtesy of the bus's owners, Zach and Greg. Below, cornfields are not what this bus was used to seeing during its early years.

A favorite subject of fellow blog writer David Wilkins is "railfans taking pictures of railfans taking pictures." But what if it's a bus? No matter. The Culver's manager was busy but was still happy to see us and got a few pictures of his own of the unusual visitor to his restaurant.

And on the way back, we stopped for diesel. It was a bit tight under that canopy, but we made it. The bus had a bout half a tank left, but its next trip will be back to its home south of Chicago so there was no time like the present to fill up. You don't want to know what the bill for this was.