Sunday Report

Frank writes...

Sunday was a beautiful, sunny day in the 70s. I had actually brought my daughter out on Saturday to ride the Pumpkin Train (running this coming weekend too - be sure to tell your friends!) and noticed that the CB&Q scale test car parked behind the Steam Shop had had its tarp removed. A few years ago I had traced what lettering I could off the car, but those tracings had gone missing, so a year ago I agreed to re-trace the lettering. However, the car was shortly thereafter tarped.

I spent a little while tracing lettering fragments onto Mylar, just to put into the files. The car had at least three paint jobs: its as-built livery, which is the only one that is well documented thanks to a nice builder's photo, and featured "SCALE TEST CAR" lettering on the sides in segmented stencil-style lettering; its end-of-service livery, with "SCALE TEST" on the sides in bigger letters (that's what's vaguely evident in the photo above); and at least one intermediate livery with "SCALE TEST CAR" on the side of the car, but with only a few difficult-to-make-out fragments remaining. Anyway, the information has now been recorded.

After that, I spent a while brush painting on the 63, putting a second coat on areas like the front window alcove, anticlimbers, and doors. It still needs one (well, hopefully just one) more coat of orange on the side sheets, but depending on the weather, that may need to wait until the spring.

Norm was working on the Electroliner, Nick and Greg were moving more spare parts out of the area that will soon become the car shop parking lot, and Joel and Richard were clearing space in the "first addition" section of Barn 4 - now the middle third of the building - so that the electrician can install nice new LED work lights. Others including Zach, Matthew and Jimmy were also hard at work, among other things getting the Illinois Terminal train inspected and then switched back to Barn 8. Joel showed me the air compressor above; I'm not sure where it's from, but it's going to be piped in as a backup to the current two shop air compressors.

Inside the wood shop, Buzz has been hard at work. The table saw in the background is new, while the table saw in the foreground - which used to be where the one in the background is now - has been moved to the former site of the Berlin sander. Joel reports that one of these will be used for ripping and the other for cross-cutting. Swanky! I also ran into Charlie, who did the lion's share of the body restoration and painting work on CA&E 451 back in 2010-2011, and we took a look through the car. We're increasingly convinced that the interior, which is now tan, was originally blue like the 460. Even the baggage racks, which on the 460 are silver, have blue paint under the tan. Since the 451 is being backdated to its condition around 1947-1948, that means the interior should go back to being blue. Pretty neat!