Sunday Progress Report

Frank writes...

Sunday was a beautiful fall day in the 50s, and thanks to several volunteers in the department, we made a lot of progress on the 18.

The most photogenic progress was on seats. Frank Kehoe painted the last of the seat cushions for the car during the week - thank you, Frank!! - and so Jimmy helped me carry these over to Barn 7. He then bolted the transverse seat cushions in the front half of the car into place while I screwed the various bench seat and "nickel seat" backs in place. Above, the bench seat in the drop section is shown after reassembly. The single seat furthest from the camera, which was added after the coal stove at this location was removed, hasn't been painted. This was beautifully re-covered by Tim Peters a year and a half ago and for the moment, at least, I don't have the heart to paint it. It blends in pretty well with the painted seats anyway, though.

The rear bench seat is a real pain to install since the 10 pieces fit together very tightly and only seem to go together in one order.

Later in the afternoon, I painted two more transverse seat backs, making three of these in total that have been painted. Above you can see two, with the unpainted ones behind them. Painting these in fresh "straw-colored" paint makes a real difference!

Meanwhile, Greg and Good Nick were helping with mechanical issues. Nick removed the brake stand, which had a stem gasket leak, and replaced the stem gasket. That takes care of what was by far the most noticeable air leak on the car. He also re-secured the buzzer interrupter to the wall in the cab. Thanks, Nick! For his part, Greg scraped some old duct tape residue off the windows and then gamely crawled under the car to check the air compressor. We'd like to put the car over the pit to pull and clean the bottle valves, given the close clearances under the car.

For my part, I also went over the snap switch lettering in the cab. The original lettering was so badly faded that even in daylight it could barely be read without a flashlight (note that there's no overhead light in the cab - the motorman relies entirely on light coming in through the windows from the passenger compartment). This helps out. That gap between the middle and right switch used to contain a fourth snap switch for the coal stove blower, as evidenced by the word "STOVE" along the bottom, but since that switch no longer exists I didn't trace over that lettering and just left it original.

In other news, several of the regulars were out of town but Joel was doing more prep work for HHR, Jimmy was priming new boards for the new DC Line switch enclosure, and Bob was machining more contactor pins for the Class B.