Spring Forward

Frank writes...

Sunday was a beautiful spring-like day and there was plenty of activity at the museum.

I, of course, was working on seats in the 460. Above, the narrow bulkhead seat on the left, inside the smoker against the main compartment bulkhead, was replaced. Thanks to Jimmy and Will for help in getting this seat back into the frame.

The second seat for the day was back-to-back with the first one, on the other side of the partition just inside the main compartment. Here is the "before" photo, albeit after the cushion was removed, of course. The condition of this seat, with a noticeable rip in the fabric, is typical of a lot of the ones we've removed from the 460.

This seat has some air equipment underneath it. There's a big handle for the main brake cutout, a smaller one to cut out the feed valve, the feed valve itself hiding behind the seat frame, and then the brake cylinder drain cock located next to the baseboard heater.

And here's the "after" photo with the new seat installed. A big thank you to Richard for making it possible to get this seat done! We are replacing 26 seats in this car, and this is seat #21, so we only have five to go. Our current expectation is that the new seats in the 460 will make their debut for the Bunny Trolley Hop event in April, or possibly on Sunday, April 6th, which is opening day.

In other news, more progress has been made on the storage building extension at the south end of the property.

And Ted was working on cleaning up and painting storage bins. This isn't thrilling work, but it's important. It will be instrumental in helping us in the complete reorganization of our spare parts, fasteners, and components. There was a lot more happening that isn't pictured. Nick, Greg, and Zach were switching cars and working on testing the second substation, which is back online after a couple of years of upgrade work. This substation will power the overhead on the property and on the main line west of the East Switch, as it did until the last couple of years. Jimmy and Will were working on fixing air leaks on the IC MU cars. Joel and Jeron were working on inspecting CTA 3142, including switching it back to Barn 7 at the end of the day with help from Matt, and also on some miscellaneous shop tasks. The Electroliner crew were hard at work, at one point using the shop lathe, though I'm not sure for what. Richard was also making progress on the rail display in Barn 8.