Painting and Pouring

Frank writes...

I was at IRM on Saturday this weekend instead of the usual Sunday. There was a lot going on.

I spent a couple of hours in Barn 7 putting another coat of orange on car 63. This makes two, and in places three, coats on pretty much the entire car, except for parts of the doors and some other nooks and crannies I need to hit again with a brush.

That was the least of the painting news, though. Over in Yard 2, Jamie spent the entire day Friday spraying a coat of primer onto one of the bi-level cars we acquired back in January, helped by other Diesel Department volunteers. Saturday, he started with the green - this car will be painted as C&NW 83 and will match our existing three-car set of C&NW bi-levels.

The first photo was taken when I arrived, before green had started going on; when I left mid-afternoon, the car had the entire roof painted green and finish paint was going onto the sides rapidly. The museum really owes the Diesel Department volunteers a big thank you for all their work on this car (and also on the second of the new bi-levels, which is currently in the shop). It will allow us to add a lot more seats to the Happy Holiday Railway event.

And in yet more painting news, Zach was painting newly acquired bus wheels. Here he is after scuffing up the powder-coated wheels, applying masking tape.

In addition to painting, there was also pouring - concrete, that is! Dave and the B&G crew were hard at work pouring concrete around the Barn 4 addition. Here we see them at work outside the door adjacent to the inspection pit; in the background, Jamie is up on the roof of the bi-level applying green paint.

Later in the day, after the concrete pouring had concluded, I grabbed this shot of a paved sidewalk along the south edge of the new shop extension.

The B&G crew is also hoping to pave the new parking lot east of the Barn 4 extension sometime soon, and just before I left, Good Nick and Dan were using a small rubber-tire crane we recently acquired to move spare traction motors out of the way.

While I was passing through the "lean-three," I snapped a photo of some gorgeous refinished trim pieces for the 306.

And finally, Bill Wulfert brought out a fascinating artifact he is working on fixing up. It's a Chicago Rapid Transit coasting clock that at one time was assigned a 2700-series open-platform Metropolitan Elevated car. That spool to the right holds a roll of paper, and at the beginning of each run, a special key with the run number cast into it was inserted into a keyway in the cover. It would make an imprint on the paper and a figure for how much time the train had spent coasting was also imprinted. Hopefully Bill can provide more info, but basically, the coasting clock would advance when the train was moving but 1) the motors weren't running, and 2) the brakes weren't applied (there was a little pipe coming out of the brake cylinder that helped register this!). At the end of the run, the motorman would imprint that key and the coasting measurement again, advance the paper out the side of this box, tear it off, and submit it at the end of his shift. Pretty ingenious! Bill says that CRT 1797 still has most, or maybe all, of its under-floor equipment for making this whole system work.