Weekend Report

Frank writes...

I had some IT issues (no, not that IT) over the weekend that prevented me from posting for a couple of days, so what might have been two or three posts is being compressed into one.

I was only out on Sunday, but fortunately our intrepid freelance photographer Steven sent along photos he took throughout the weekend (also fortunate because I completely forgot to take any photos of my own on Sunday). We'll start with Friday night, when he was out getting an early start on the weekend work.

First, an overview of some of the few remaining seats from Shaker Heights 18 remaining to be painted. The ones with a swoop up at the back are bench or nickel seat cushions. Steven got most of the pictured seats painted by the end of the night - thank you, Steven!!

Of course, the 415 is still the focus of a flurry of work. Here it is over in Barn 2 nearing readiness for paint.

Steven wire-wheeled trolley poles for the car. Before is above, after is below.

And then he helped Joel run cords to run some of the light strings that will be located all over the property for HHR. There is an enormous amount of largely unseen effort that goes into readying IRM for this event.

Then on Saturday, Steven and Joel worked on stripping parts off the old power routing box located outside the substation and began working on building the new replacement box. This is just an enclosure for the large switches on the outside of the substation that allow us to control what parts of the overhead network are receiving power from where, but as you can tell, the old box was life expired.

And that brings us to Sunday. I showed up mid-afternoon, a little later than usual, and with help from Good Nick, Greg, and Steven, we got all of the painted seats from the 18 that were in the "lean-three" brought over to the car. I still need to install them all, but just lugging them over there was a big help. Steven took a couple of photos. First, here's one of the seats with a repainted cushion and un-repainted seat back:

...followed by a view of the one seat whose back I have painted. Even with the car lights off, the difference is pretty clear. Once these are all done, it will really make the interior of the car look a lot better.

I also removed the last few bench seat backs from the car and brought them into the shop. We're down to just six or eight "pieces" remaining that can be painted in the shop, and once those are all done, only the cross-seat backs - which would be too difficult to remove, and will need to be painted in place - will remain to be done.

After dinner, I helped Nick a bit with some DA sanding on the 415 to smooth down areas where wood putty had been applied. Even on a steel car like the 415, there's still a lot of wood, notably the windows, doors, and corner posts. Meanwhile, Steven was over in Barn 4, sand-blasting the 415's tow bar pins:

During the day, Bus Department Steven had wire-wheeled about one and a half of the 415's retrievers, so Sunday night Steven finished wire-wheeling the remaining retriever. This is an Earll, if you were wondering.

Of course, as always, there were other things going on Sunday. Zach was working on one of the North Shore cars, Joel was putting up strings of lights, and Nathan was fighting the latest battle in the ongoing war with the small forklift.

Meanwhile, Brian, Bob, and Mikey spent the weekend working on machining more pins for the contactors in the Class B. Brian reported that they completed 10 contactor rebuilds this weekend. Below, he shows off one of the contactors with its new pins, followed by a shot of the pile of shavings that was left over and then a cool shot Steven took of the bank of contactors inside the locomotive. IRM certainly has the most Type M-equipped cars in regular operation of any museum, I'd say, and we can now boast that we have what must be one of the more accomplished Type M contactor rebuilding endeavors among the museum community.

And finally, Steven and Jimmy got the heat on the Green Hornet prepped for Happy Holiday Railway. The primary heating system on the car is the "heat dump," which consists of dampers that open and admit the warm air that's been blown over the grids (really, the accelerator ribbons) into the car instead of directing it out to the atmosphere, as you'd do during the warmer months. Unfortunately, the dampers have never worked, so for HHR the dampers are manually fastened in the "open" position, then moved back in the spring so that we aren't toasting our passengers in the summer. Steven and Jimmy also discovered that the blades had come out of the small fan that warms the motorman's feet and fixed that, as shown in these before-and-after views.

The issue with the "heat dump" system is that it only works when the car is operating. This isn't a problem on Western Avenue, but at IRM, we tend to make a lot of use of the auxiliary heating system, which consists of a handful of normal coil-wound heaters in the baseboard heat ducts. Unfortunately, at the moment these have a couple of open elements and are nonfunctional. Anyone have a good source for street railway-type coil-wound resistor wire?