Good News and Bad

Frank writes...

I was out at IRM on Sunday, as usual. Per the name of this post, first we'll get the bad news out of the way: the 18 will not be running for Happy Holiday Railway, despite the flurry of activity over the last couple of months to have it ready as a backup car. As you may be aware, its air compressor has the bad habit of flashing over (with no permanent damage yet) in cold weather. We hoped that the slotting and stoning work a couple of weeks ago had fixed that, but evidently it did not. Saturday evening the car had to be switched out of the way of something else and ended up sitting in the yard for a while beyond the reach of block heaters that had been keeping the pump warm. When the pole was put up again, the pump flashed over.

Oh, well. I didn't get around to inspecting the car's pump on Sunday, but hopefully it survived this flashover too and will be okay for service again when the weather warms up. (Hey, if you have a few thousand extra dollars laying around with "National BB2 professional rebuild" written all over them, let us know!)

But that leads us to the good news: there was a lot of progress on the Eclipse fender! Frank Kehoe was out again, and we cut the lengths of pipe that Nick and Joel sourced to length, ground the notches in them that hold them into the castings, and test fit everything. Above, you can see the pipe across the top of the fender has been replaced; in the photo below, we've gotten both the top and bottom pipes replaced. We also flipped the whole thing over between these two shots.

This was made possible because on Saturday, Dan Fenlaciki spent quite a while repairing one of the elbow castings that was cracked and slightly spread. He was able to return it to good as new, as shown below. Thank you, Dan!

There was other progress on the fender that I didn't record, too. Frank Kehoe removed one of the metal strips from the basket that had rusted through. He also removed one of the few undamaged metal strips from the donor basket and then sand-blasted that one so that we can thread it back into the basket we're using. We'd also procured metal strip to make replacement loops to hold the basket to the top and bottom bars. Richard cut this into 6-1/2" lengths and then came up with a method for forming the loops that worked quite well. I made up eight of those (only two of the 10 originals are still usable; most rusted away entirely and are gone) and they'll just need to be drilled and trimmed to length.

In other news, Zach spent some time rebuilding a lightning arrester for the 306 while Bob, Mikey, and Brian continued working on reinstalling contactors in the Class B. A whole gang including Good Nick, Greg, Steven, and Zach also spent quite a while sanding on the 415 over in Barn 2, but I didn't get a photo of that work.

And the Bus Department was hard at work, too. Here, Richard and a volunteer I'm afraid I don't know show off a newly chromed bumper for Milwaukee 441. This still needs to be polished, but it's clear that it is really going to look terrific.