Frank writes…
With HHR firmly in the rear view mirror, Sunday turned out to be more of a normal workday, though Joel was still out for much of the afternoon gathering in Christmas lights. Unfortunately, I failed to take any photos of what was probably my most interesting project for the day: helping Richard diagnose and fix an issue with the 18's heat. The car has electric baseboard heaters that work quite nicely, but the handful of times I've run them, they've never shut off until I manually turn them off. This suggests an issue with either the heat contactor (which is a "fail on" design) or the thermostat.
It turned out that the thermostat fuse wasn't making good contact because the clips were widened out and corroded, so we fixed that and then shorted across the thermostat contacts to confirm the contactor works as it should. Success! The next step will be to testing the thermostat itself, and to do that I'll need to turn the heat on and hang out in the car for a while until it warms up. Hopefully, that will be sometime soon. Thanks to Richard for his work on this little project!
In other news, I spent some time looking for spare parts out in the field, and measured how much extra space there is on Track 84 in case we decide to put AX545 on display at the west end of that track next to the X4 (the answer is about 6-8 feet, or barely enough). But what else was going on?
Richard is back at work on his wintertime project of late, the Barn 8 rail display. Here we see the beneficiaries of his painting activities on Sunday. At right is a piece of rail painted to differentiate the head, web, and base of the rail for educational purposes. The other piece of rail is a real rarity that was discovered in the corner of the Signal Shop, where it had likely been squirreled away years ago by Johnson. It's a piece of pear-head rail dating to 1874 and it's marked for the B&O RR. It turns out that the B&O was one of just two railroads in the mid-1870s that had its own rolling mill for rail, located in Cumberland, Maryland (the other railroad was the Philadelphia & Reading, for what that's worth).
Over in the paint booth were more items for Richard's display. These are examples of - if memory serves - 40-, 60-, 80-, and 100-pound rail, which will be labeled appropriately to demonstrate the variety of sizes in which rail comes.
Out in the barn, Good Nick was taking a break from presidenting to assemble a rebuilt tray of batteries for the CTA 2200s. Here, he's cleaning up threads where the cables attach to the lugs.
I got a chance to speak briefly with Mike S, who is responsible for most of the progress on cleaning up and painting the air compressor wagon. This past week, he painted the entire floor in the 3142 himself, as shown above.
And while the aforementioned 3142 was on the inspection pit, the weekend's "mechanical crew" of Brian, Jimmy, and Will tackled some issues that have cropped up with our most-used streetcar. They removed a couple of levers from the brake rigging, I believe to replace the bushings, and were also looking at some other stuff under the car I'm less sure about. Above, Brian would never look down upon lowly inspection pit workers, but nevertheless he sent the above photo taken of Will looking straight up through one of the 3142's inspection hatches.
In other news, more work was done on New Jersey 4, the Newark PCC. The last wheel to be replaced has bolts located too close to the hub to fit an impact socket on, making them difficult to remove (on the other wheel bolted in like this, we ended up having to torch off two of the bolts). The crew was able to find a thin-wall socket and remove three of the bolts with that, but it wasn't impact-rated. We expected it to fail and it did, so the crew will tackle the three remaining bolts next time.
4 comments:
We also dug into 3142's controller to see if we could find the cause of some recent stiffness reported by operators. We swapped a couple of tips around to see if that fixes the problem. Fingers crossed.
We're also doing the rather unglamorous but necessary task of updating the wheel report on the car. With over 1,100 miles (in a circle) being put on the car this last year alone, wheel wear does happen.
It just occurred to me -- do we still have any of the 78-pound New Haven rail? At one time several hundred feet of the west end were laid with that, because it was donated to us by Elliott Donnelley. It might be interesting to compare that with a standard 80-pound section.
Do you guys have on hand any 8, 12,16, 20, 24, 30, or 33 lb rail on hand? Railways came in all sizes.
If you do get new hard rubber tires put on the wheels for the compressor wagon; be very specific with the company doing the work that the new tires are to look exactly like the old ones and are need to be plain with nothing embossed on the sidewalls. In the antique car & truck hobby I’ve seen several examples over the years where the “new” hard rubber tires have the name & logo of the tire company embossed big, bold, and deep on the sidewalls and the customer was very unaware they would come that way.
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