Nearing the Finish Line

Frank writes...

Sunday was another day of steady progress on the curve-sider seat project. First, the big news of the day was that Jon F was out with his SUV to start taking the second car's worth of seats to the upholstery shop to be redone.

We sent 10 seat backs and 11 seats' worth of cushions to the upholstery shop in Bellwood (late edit: Jon dropped them all off on Monday). Above are four of the seat backs leaning against the 234's truss rod. These seats were removed from the 460 but will go back into the 451. Many thanks to Jon and to Mike for helping load and transport these!

Back to the 460, a huge thanks goes out to Richard for spending the better part of the afternoon working with me to get the day's quota of two more seats completed. One was the remaining partition seat, in the main compartment located next to the smoker partition, shown above. Underneath this seat is the car's S-type governor.

The second seat completed Sunday was against the equipment locker at the #1 end of the car, shown here.

Here's the "after" view of that partition seat. There are now only four original seats left in the 460: the two single seats in the corners, by the railfan windows, and the two double seats closest to the #2 end of the car.

I moved all the remaining seats and cushions that had been removed from the 460 over to the 451, so the 460 is less crowded with random seat components now. And we installed the above "car card" that lists the donors to the 460 seat project and assigns each a seat (or more than one, depending on how many seats they sponsored). Similar car cards will go into the 451 and 453 when those cars receive their seats. All seating is still first-come, first-served as always, of course, but we hope this helps our donors in making the results of their contributions more tangible.

In other news, progress continues apace on the storage building extension. Despite warm weather a few days earlier, it snowed Sunday morning and had stopped just an hour or so before I arrived.

And here's proof that reader and friend of the blog David Johnston was absolutely right when he identified the mystery casting as a pantograph part! A broken pantograph component was found by Jimmy over at the IC MU cars as evidence. In other news, Joel was hard at work organizing parts and moving tools into the new shop extension; Jeron and others were working on inspecting the 1374; Greg and Nick were testing and cleaning substation components; Norm was stripping paint off ceiling trim for Michigan Electric 28; and Nathan, Mikey, Jimmy, and Will were all buzzing around, often on the Taylor-Dunn, but I'm not sure what they were up to.