Door Repair, and Much Else

Today was another productive session in the Car Shop.  I have lots of photos, but still managed to miss several things that were happening.  

My current project was repairing the #2 train door on the 460.  After rechecking the measurements, it was slightly trimmed on the bottom and then painted.  This is the outside, and most of the patched area is covered by a steel plate, so it still matches.

Meanwhile, Tim was hard at work making new maple flooring for the 1268, which will soon be backdated to the 268.   Tim continues to move forward into the past.

Here he's ripping out the ribs for the floor.

And he wants you to notice that they're not square.  Everything has to be historically accurate.

And another interesting project is getting ready to letter the 28.  If Norm is satisfied, it must be correct.

And here we see Fritz carefully tracing a number from the car.  As we have noticed before, since the numbers were often done by hand, they are not all the same, and we need to come up with a pattern that  minimizes the average deviation, based on the central limit theorem.  (Of course, in practice we just rely on skill and artistic ability, rather than mathematics.)  

And Gregg continued to work on the Green Bay car.

Ralph from the Steam Dept. was helping on this, by making new wood moldings for the interior.  I can tell you these are not easy to do.

After lunch, I got help from a couple of the guys in carefully turning the door over so I could paint the inside.  The paint here is a little faded, but it still has the original railroad lettering that I'd like to save, so maybe we can work on matching it at some point.

This door is too heavy for us old guys to be trying to install in this frigid weather, so I'm hoping maybe some younger volunteers can get it into place.