End of the Season

Frank writes...

We're posting a bit out of order here, but my father got his post about Monday's news written before I even started on my post about Sunday's news. Oh well. Sunday was the end of the museum's regular season and the final day of the Pumpkin Train event. It was also (barely) warm enough for another coat of paint on the latest "broom job" cosmetic restoration subject.

I put a third coat of orange on the entire car below the belt rail. It may need one more coat, I'm not sure, but it is looking a lot better regardless. If I get another day or two of warm weather this fall, great; if not, then in the spring we'll apply the maroon pin-striping, black lettering, and grey roof paint. After this, I went along Bruneau Drive at Joel's request and used a paint marker to identify some of our spare air compressors. I believe the plan is to move these into indoor storage in the new Barn 4 addition.

The exciting news came after we returned from dinner, though. After cleaning up a couple of the antimacassars from the 451, I took one of the reupholstered seat backs over to the 460 for a test fitting. The lights didn't work because the batteries were dead - this darn modern technology! - but by flashlight, I was able to get the first redone seat back into place.

Success! It's hard to see below, but I got two of the three machine screws that go down through the tube frame into the seat back threaded in. The third is close but I couldn't get it to thread in; with leatherette and fabric in the way, it's almost impossible to see exactly what you're doing. But we'll get there. It will also be a simple job to install the three wood screws that go sideways into the bottom of the seat back, and then we install new cushions and voila! You can see in the above photo that some of the original seats in the 460 are pretty rough; the one I took out for this test-fitting had stuffing spilling out. This will be a big improvement.

In other news, the future car shop parking lot has been scraped down. I don't think they plan on paving it this week, but that may happen sometime later in November. Several of the Sunday regulars were off on a field trip, but Joel was buzzing around doing Joel things. Jimmy was in streetcar service all day, but after he put the 3142 away, he retrieved an air gauge from the 309 that had been acting up and repaired it. Thanks, Jimmy!

And finally, Joel sends along this photo taken inside the cab of the Electroliner, where I believe they have gotten a coat of finish paint on almost everything. So, that's coming along.