Annual Meeting Weekend

Frank writes...

This past weekend featured a day full of activities on Saturday, with the safety meeting and rules test in the afternoon followed by the annual membership meeting in the evening. Unfortunately I missed the afternoon's festivities, but I did make it to the membership meeting.

One interesting part of the meeting, which took place while the tellers were counting ballots during the board of directors election, was a presentation on the planned Visitor Center and on the capital campaign that is getting underway. Our Event Manager, Tricia (above), one of the leaders of the capital campaign, Mark (below), and Executive Director Marcus Ruef all gave excellent presentations and took questions.

Everyone was cheered by the fact that only one ballot was necessary to elect three board members. The usual congratulations and condolences go out to Marcus Ruef, who was reelected, and to new board members Scott Nauer and Andrew Ossler. Outgoing president Nick Espevik, who went off the board due to term limits, was succeeded by fellow Electric Car Department volunteer Zach Ehlers, who is now the museum's president. Congratulations, Zach!

Glutton for punishment that I am, I was back out at the museum on Sunday. What was it Bob Bruneau used to say concerning the subject of how much time he spent at IRM? "When you're dumb, you suffer!"

I spent much of the afternoon looking through the contactor box under the 319. The goal was to figure out why the car doesn't sequence in parallel. While this isn't necessary for operation, we'd still like to determine what's going wrong.

For future reference, the sequence chart here (the first one, not the "correct" second one) is still what we're seeing. Numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 aren't picking up at all, and 9 isn't picking up until the 10th point. The interlocks all appeared to make, and some (though not all) were tested for continuity. We also tested the connection from the cabinet to #2 interlock, and that wasn't a problem. The next guess is that the lifting coil on 1, 3, or 6 may be bad. I was able to test the coil on contactor 3, and it read okay, but wasn't able to get to the other two. The coils on these DB-260s are hard to access; you need to detach the board on the back of the contactor that holds the interlocks or control resistors, depending on the contactor. Anyway, the next step is probably to test the coils on contactors 1 and 6 at some point. In the meantime, the 319 has been cleared for service (except for lubrication, which needs to be done outside at some point in the next few weeks) and can be moved back home to Barn 8. Many thanks to Brian, Jimmy, and Richard, who helped with this project, and to Nathan, who finished up a lot of the tough inspection work (like motor and roof inspection) on Friday.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. Or maybe it's just Yard 6. Good Nick hauled this 460 door, which he painted last weekend, over to Yard 6 to compare to the actual car in the sunlight. Unfortunately, for the second time, the color match was noticeably off. We will need to have the paint company come out and color-match the car.

However, we need the 460 in service, so we agreed that the short-term solution is to patch the paint on the doors with "slightly off" red and put them back on the car. Here are the doors ready to be touched up; I sanded and primed the Bondo patch my father had applied to the side door, on the right, to fill a rust hole in the steel sheet.

More exciting things were happening elsewhere. On Saturday, we were notified that the occupancy permit for the new South Storage Building - aka the Bob Bourne Transit Building - had been granted. Richard moved the first bus into the building Saturday after the annual meeting. On Sunday, it was time for everyone's favorite air compressor wagon, AX545, to finally exit the "lean-three" shop. Above, Brian and Richard hook it up to our new-to-us airport tug.

And away they go! This is Richard and Steven on the tug, with Brian following. It was at just this point I got the call to come check paint matches on the 460 door, so I didn't follow AX545 all the way to the new barn.

Fortunately, Brian sent photos of AX545 in its new temporary home. It is not remaining in this barn long-term, but to send its wheels out to get badly needed replacement tires, we need to leave the wagon on blocks for a while. Once the wheels come back repaired, the wagon will leave the Bourne Building.

As you can see, AX545 was the second thing in the new barn after the newer of the two Janesville buses. (Well, I suppose the airport tug was the second thing.) Speaking of new tires, we still need to raise money to get the wheels for AX545 shipped out and re-tired! You can help - click here and donate to the Electric Car Department/Equipment Restoration fund. And don't forget to email us and let us know your donation is to go to AX545!

I spent a few minutes talking with Steve, who was grinding away rusted steel on the Kansas City PCC. I need to trace the front and back outline of the "spitball" along with the car number, since the plan is to strip the paint off the car and repaint it using good-quality paint. Steve revealed that careful examination of a portion of the car that hadn't seen sunlight revealed that the color I painted the 755 back in 2001 was pretty spot-on accurate, so that was nice to hear. We had matched the color to an original sample that, as it turns out, Steve himself had procured from a junkyard somewhere out in Kansas.

Of course, Brian and Will were working on air brake things as usual. While we were looking around for DB-260 stuff, we happened upon some boxes of governor parts, which were forwarded to Brian. Included in the miscellany was this bag of gaskets marked for "700 loco." That would be for 700-series South Shore locomotives, the big ex-New York Central freight locomotives that were cut up in the 1970s. I'm sure this bag made its way to IRM from Michigan City at some point thereafter.