Soggy Sunday

Frank writes…

Sunday was a productive day despite a light rain that fell constantly from noon onward.

I divided my time between a handful of small projects. First up was installing the last two third rail beams on the 409. These were completed by my father a couple of months ago, and they've been sitting alongside the 451 in Barn 4 awaiting installation. They're "summer" beams, so I was able to install them myself because the lack of sleet scraper equipment means they're about half the weight of the "fully equipped" beams.

The bolt heads as well as the fuse clips on one of the beams still need to be primed and painted, but there's no tremendous rush on that. All three of our regular service steel cars now have a full set of third rail beams (though admittedly the 409 is out of service at the moment for air compressor work).

I also sprayed the bolt heads on the new beams on the 460 black, as shown here - it may not be obvious, but that's the point! And there were a couple of other things I worked on that I failed to get any photos of. I did some inspection work on the 18, checking out the air compressor among other things. WANTED: a conductor for the 18 for this coming Saturday, June 27th, during Trolley Weekend. C'mon, you know you've always wanted to be a conductor on the Shaker Heights line! Go to VSP and sign up today!

I also spent a while working on fixing up a couple of spare air tanks for our spare parts supply - thank you to Zach for his help with this. There was plenty of work being done around the shop. Nick was working on inspecting the CTA 2200s; Tim was working on the 268; Jimmy was working on diagnosing the issues with the 600V power supply into Barn 8; Brian was working on air brake stuff; Richard and Steven were working on rebuilding a trolley catcher for Veracruz 19 that will replace the retriever currently on the car; and Zach was conducting line training. Joel and Steven also had a rare opportunity: a man who spent his childhood living in Fort Wayne-Lima 91, back when it was a house, came out to visit along with his kids and grandkids. The family toured the car, which is located in Barn 13, while Joel and Steven spoke with them and recorded some of their reminiscences. We hope to be able to publish some of this material in the future.