Progress on the 451

Frank writes...

Super Bowl Sunday featured more needle-chipping in the 451.

Many thanks to Greg and Jimmy, who during the week had completed needle-chipping the ceiling in the 451's smoker and made tremendous progress. .They had just about completed the rest of the compartment. I did a little bit of touch-up, including chipping the posts down to the floor and the closet doorway, but that was about all. Above is the view from the end of the car looking toward the partition and the main compartment; below is the view looking toward the platform.

We're not 100% done with needle-chipping in the smoker; there are a few wooden trim pieces still to take down, and then we can chip the metal around those. But other than that, we're ready to move on to the next steps, namely wire-wheeling the metal and lightly sanding the particle-board panels under the windows to prep everything for paint.

Above, here's the "before" view looking from the partition into the main compartment. It's obvious that the paint is failing badly in some areas, especially over the windows and in certain areas of the ceiling. Don't get too used to that tan!

By the end of the day, I'd made some progress in the main compartment, particularly on the first ceiling section. I'd like to think that holding a needle-chipper over my head is good exercise, but I guess we'll see.

In that earlier photo, the baggage racks were still in place along the R side of the car, but thanks to Greg, Good Nick and Bob, we got those taken down and removed from the car. They're now ready to be wire-wheeled. In the above photo, you can see all of the 451's baggage racks as well as, in the foreground, the air strainer and piping to the air compressor. More on that later!

We want to take the interior doors off so they can be stripped and repainted on the bench. Greg got the door to the "equipment closet" off and it had this UL tag dated September 23, 1945.

Zach was working on a brush holder for the 451; the car's motors have been given a preliminary megger test that reveals none are shorted, but the motors are pretty dirty and a couple of brush holders have broken springs that will need attention. One of our goals is to see whether we can get the motors cleaned up enough to run them without having to send them out for rebuilding.

Speaking of mechanical progress, on Saturday, the guys got the 451's air compressor running! It's not yet piped in; one or two pipe fittings are on order and should arrive soon. In the meantime, it was tested "not under load" and seemed to run fine, though of course the real test will be to see whether it can pump up the car. Zach pointed out that this is a late-model DH-25 with disc valves instead of bottle valves. We have a few others of this type in our collection, including under the Electroliner and under at least one or two of the North Shore cars.

In other news, I got a brief tour of the air brake room from Brian, who has been working with Joel to empty this space - for many years the ironically named "clean room" - of the various accumulated things that had been clogging it up. They've also set up a small work bench between the 3-T (left) and 3-UE racks, shown here.

Above is a photo that Brian took from the chair at his workbench looking east, where Jimmy is using our spring tester during the process of rebuilding a safety valve for the 451. Brian is also working on rebuilding the car's feed valve and governor, which mercifully is an S-type and not a J. Once more "stuff" is cleared out of this room, the bench Jimmy is working at will become the primary work space.

And Nick was working on this fast-acting breaker that will be installed in our smaller substation. You may recall that we have two substations, the "big" one in the building that normally powers the main line east of the East Switch, and the "little" one (by size, at least) in the steel box next to the substation building. This one normally powers the property and the west end of the main line, but at the moment it's out of service. This breaker, which Randy Anderson obtained for us many years ago, is going to be installed in the smaller substation to get it working again. Nick observed that the breaker in that substation that just failed typically took about 70 milliseconds to open in the event of a fault, while this one should take somewhere around 10-30 milliseconds. So, that's good.

There was other stuff happening, too, including additional progress on the 451 and (of course) progress on other projects. A huge thank you goes out to everyone who is driving the work on the 451 forward!