PCC Painting Progress

Frank writes...

Good news, everybody! The paint I ordered came in and Joel even picked it up at the store in Huntley on Saturday. As such, on Sunday it was time to grab my trim roller and get to work.

Above is the "before" shot of car 63. Don't get too used to those red and orange stripes.

And this is an hour or so later, after painting the top half of the left side of the car vermilion. I had already done the edges and "inside corners" with a brush, but the trim roller was still instrumental in working around plenty of windows and other features. At this point, I took a break because it was time for a switch move!

The goal was to shuffle the order on track 73 a bit. The first three cars - 4391, 1374, and 18 - moved themselves out of the barn under their own power. Here's the 18 on the tail track. She doesn't look too shabby, if I do say so myself, though of course there's plenty more to be done in the way of exterior repainting.

The 63 was towed out by the 45-tonner. This was its first trip outside since we started painting it, so it was interesting to see the eye-searing shade of red-orange out in the sun. As you can tell, it needs another coat or two - probably two more coats on the bottom half.

We took the 18 around the car line a few times on training trips and stopped to get a shot showing half of our Shaker Heights Rapid Transit fleet (the half that's being restored to Shaker Heights colors!). Behind the 63 was Milwaukee 972, which moved itself out of the barn under its own power, and then the 63 was moved back in with the other cars on top of it.

After all the switching came dinner, and after dinner was more painting. This time, I did the bottom half of the car and got the front end (and around the front window) and left side. I ran out of time before I could complete the left side skirts or rear end, but it makes a big difference in the look of the car.

I couldn't replicate my "before" shot because the car is now 50' further west and there's a big pile of stuff in the way, but here's a rear three-quarters view. It's coming along!

In other news, Joel has started assembling pallet racking in the new Barn 4 extension. The south wall of the barn was pushed out a few feet to permit this; this will give us the ability to store a whole lot of spare parts a whole lot more efficiently. Thanks also go to the weekday guys who have been "restoring" and nicely painting the new-to-us pallet rack components!

Greg and Joel were both working on the grid box rebuild for ComEd 4. Here we see Greg "building the sandwich," as he said, and stacking the grid elements, mica washers and copper washers in the correct order.

Voila! This grid box is needed become the 4 is scheduled to pull a train over Labor Day Weekend. In other news, Zach and Norm were working on putting brush holders back into the 604 that had been temporarily removed as part of the 1702 project; they also inspected the 1702's motors, and all appears to be well with them for the moment.