Pre-Holiday Prep

Frank writes...

The property was abuzz on Sunday with preparations for Happy Holiday Railway. This promises to be our biggest HHR yet by a good margin, given that we will have not one but two additional cars in the train. I had to head over to Barn 2 to check out the progress.

The two bi-level cars that arrived in January are being completely rehabilitated in a monumental effort by the Diesel Department. The first of the two to have its exterior paint job completed was 7716, as shown in the above photo taken last night by Lee Evans. This car looked pretty sickly when it arrived, but the diesel guys pulled out all the stops to fix it up and Jamie painted it over the course of the last week or two. A few museums have repainted bi-levels in C&NW yellow and green, but I believe this is the only one anybody has restored to RTA colors. The final yellow paint is due to go onto the second new arrival, which is being restored as C&NW 83, this week. A huge thank you to the Diesel Shop folks for getting these cars ready to go for this year's HHR event!

There were a ton of lights going up all around the property; Joel, for one, spent much of his day hanging lights. There was also this new thing located outside Barn 4, clearly the start of a demonstration rotary car dumper.

For me, I was working on CA&E stuff, of course. Many thanks to Dan, who ran the torch to remove the metal parts from the remains of the third rail beam we first saw here. What remained of the nuts and bolts had mostly turned into blobs of iron oxide, so the best way to remove them is with heat.

And here's Dan with his handiwork: the castings removed from the beam. Later on, I decided that there were a couple additional bolts that we needed to remove, so thanks to Greg for starting the torch back up to do that.

Voila! At far left is the sleet scraper cylinder; the sleet scraper head itself is just to the left of the cart handle; behind the cart handle is the third rail contact shoe, with suspension links attached; and at bottom right is the large casting that is bolted to the beam and carries the contact shoe. We are working on getting quotes to have new copies of these parts cast, so stay tuned for updates.

While we're at it, feast your eyes upon the rejuvenated Barn 4. The new LED lights are all in now, as in the roof insulation, so the shop really looks like a million bucks (and that may not be too far off the truth). We're even starting to bring active restoration projects back in.

Here's a looker: Cleveland PCC 4223 finally has all its striping on the left side of the car, and most of the striping on the right side. This was sprayed on a couple of weeks ago and makes a big difference in how the car looks. This is certainly one of the flashier, and more unusual, liveries applied to a PCC.

Norm was out, and was very pleased to help switch Michigan Electric 28 back to its home in Barn 4. He's eager to resume intensive restoration work on this car, now that it will no longer be in a public barn. In other news, Nick and Greg were working on switching, substation upgrades, and repairs to a CTA 4000 and the 2200s while Jimmy was hard at work rebuilding a J governor,.

Other than working on third rail beam parts, I also removed the last bolt from the 36's pilot. Besides that, I spent a while fighting with new seats in the 460. Fortunately, I prevailed, and the second seat is now fully installed. Just for a change of pace, I put a full-width cushion on this one. All the seats had two-piece cushions when the cars were new, but Wheaton replaced some of them with full-width cushions.

And this is neither timely nor particularly relevant to anything else going on, but our friends down the road at the Fox River Trolley Museum are working on recreating the wrecking tool box in CA&E 316 and asked for photos of the wrecking tool boxes in our cars for reference. I was surprised to find that we evidently have never posted photos of the wrecking tools from the 308 or 309 on the blog. Above is the 309; this box had to be completely rebuilt (or maybe replaced by one from the 310?) because it was directly over the fire. However, the metal parts of the tools are original, including the pry bar marked "HICKS CO."

This is the tool box in the 308, which is the only one in any of our wood cars that is entirely original (when we got the 36 and 319 from Cleveland, the tools were missing). This is also the only one with both an axe and a sledgehammer. There may be a pry bar, too, behind the frame along the bottom, but I can't recall for sure.