Sunday Update

Frank writes…

My big news for Sunday, if you can call it that, is that painting on the 63 is now complete except for the roof (and RTA emblems, but I’m hoping those end up being stickers, like the originals, and not painted on).

I spent most of my afternoon putting a second coat of maroon on the stripes at the top of the car - the stripe along the roof line as well as the drip rail underneath the standee windows - after which the masking tape came off, and voila.

I still need to touch up the grey paint along the edges of the roof line and paint the center of the roof, where I can't reach from a ladder, but that's it. It's very far from perfect, but nevertheless I daresay the car looks better than it did when I started.

In other news, Mike S has been working hard on cleaning up our air compressor wagon, AX545. You can see that he's already wire-wheeled a good portion of the frame and sides.

Richard and I traced what lettering we could off the thing, though we weren't able to get a whole lot. It looks like standard CSL Roman, so I'm hoping we can "fill in the gaps" with lettering off the X4 and F305. 

Here's the badge plate off one of the "tanks," which are the pipes built into the frame, dating it to 1936. That's a good guess as to when this was built.

Speaking of AX545, our friend Art Peterson was kind enough to spend time looking through his photo collection and sent a few shots of CSL (and later CTA) air compressor wagons at work.

Here's a 1940 photo on State Street near Randolph, and in the left foreground you can see what looks like air compressor wagon AX509 (five-oh-something, anyway) about to be passed by southbound CSL "Big Brill" 5012. If you look closely, you can see the long stick that was used to provide trolley power to the compressor. At the end of the stick was some sort of fancy L-bracket-looking thing that sat atop the wire, which together with the stick being long enough to be angled way over to the side, allowed service cars to pass the compressor wagon without having to "hop" the pole.

This undated photo is a decade or so later, showing cars eastbound on Madison at Wacker. It looks like quite a crowd has gathered to watch the track gang at work! To the left of Pullman-built postwar PCC 4089, is air compressor AX5** with part of its number out of sight.

But here's the neatest shot Art sent. Not only is it in color, and not only is there a CA&E train in the photo, but it shows our air compressor wagon, AX545! This photo was taken by George Krambles on August 30, 1953, and it shows the loop at Desplaines Avenue under construction just weeks before CA&E service was cut back to this spot. In the left background is the Great Western station with a two-car inbound CA&E train in front of it.

A closeup of AX545 shows that at the time it had a wooden tray mounted to its roof, and it also looks like it had a reel or something where today there's an extra air tank. This also looks like it was before electric "marker" lights were added to the wagon. The number and CTA emblem are plainly visible. Pretty neat.

And it's only tangentially related to AX545, but Art also sent this photo, taken just moments earlier by George at the same location. This is the train visible earlier in the background, and what interests me is that it's a nice shot of the 457's roof as built, complete with three-across roof boards and sheet metal "skirts" hiding the saddles. Thanks, Art!

Back to Sunday, the regular crew of volunteers was working on a few different things after having spent their Saturday enjoying a spiced-ham-themed CTA fan trip. Brian L and I spent a little time investigating the 319's feed valve, which was acting up in September. We decided with some confidence that the locomotive-style (M3?) feed valve currently on the car is not correct for it, and that it ought to have a normal C6 feed valve the same as the rest of the wood cars. It's likely that what's on the car now was installed by Brookins. Fortunately, the pipe bracket appears to be the original one, so it shouldn't be goo big of a project to correct this grave injustice. We'll add it to the list.