A Shaker Heights Kind of a Day

Frank writes...

After two weekends of Thomas, this past weekend was fairly quiet at the museum. For me, it was all Shaker Heights Rapid Transit, all the time.

I spent most of the afternoon, and then some additional time after dinner, putting more orange paint on car 63. This was more brush painting, getting paint on all the corners and edges that I won't be able to reach with a trim roller. Other than the car's rear bumper, which needs some white primer before putting orange paint on it, the whole car is now trimmed with orange and is ready to be rolled. The photo above was taken before I brushed any orange on below the belt rail. I also installed a lock on the 63's doors, which is an improvement over the 2x4's that had been holding them closed in less-than-ideal fashion.

The other exciting news involved the 18. When we ran the car on Trolley Weekend, we discovered that it had started climbing the frog at South Junction. This was a novel problem that had also been noticed recently with North Shore 354, which, like the 18, has "compromise tread" wheels. Anyway, we took the 18 down the car line to do some testing. Above, here comes the test train, with yours truly at the controller (thanks to Zach for the photo).

The gang checks things out. L-R, Zach, Brian, unknown, Steven, Richard, Lee, and Mikey upstairs. At first, the lead axle of each truck climbed the frog for a few inches and dropped back in as soon as the guard rail on the inside of the curve "pulled" the wheelset over, which was the same thing it had been doing before.

Time for a closer look. "Hmm. I think this track is made of track."

After some measurements and inspection work, it was determined that there were still some loose bolts holding the guard rail in. Brian went and got some tools and tightened up the guard rail. Another test trip through the frog revealed a modest success! The car no longer climbs the frog, though the frog does kind of shove the wheelset over when it gets there. We may try fiddling with this a bit more, but for the time being, the 18 is back in service, just with an admonition to keep it slow at this spot and keep a close eye on things. I can't say enough to thank everyone who helped with this, from switching streetcars out of the way to turning track wrenches: Mikey, Nathan, Richard, Brian, Lee, Good Nick, Zach, Jimmy, Joel, and I think a couple of others I'm forgetting. Thank you!!

So, what else was happening? The big news was the arrival of Zach and Greg's London Routemaster double-decker bus, which is in town for the Vintage Transport Extravaganza next weekend. It arrived mid-afternoon from its home base and is shown above (with conductor Zach on the back platform) waiting for the CTA to clear the road.

And, of course, there were plenty of other things happening. Joel spent much of his time working on repairing the reverser on the 749, which had a leaky magnet valve. One of these days, those Westinghouse engineers will discover the joys of electromagnetic rather than electropneumatic control. Jimmy helped him for a while with that. Nick was working on the substation, which is having some new control equipment installed. Above, Steven paints grid boxes for ComEd 4, which had a grid element burn up during the Thomas event. This box has been disassembled for rebuilding, a task which we know all too well (type "grid box" into the blog search bar and you'll see, oh, a few posts...).

Oh, and we almost forgot - tell your friends about the Vintage Transport Extravaganza this Sunday! We're planning to run the 308 in revenue service for the first time in five years. Oh, and there will be a lot of old cars, steam and diesel trains, etc.