The Third Car

Over the past two days I finished inspection and lubrication on the 308, so that we now have all three of the wood CA&E cars ready for service. The interior of the 308 looks very good. On Wednesday all of the inspection items were finished, including such things as testing the air system and adjusting the safety valve and feed valve, but it was raining off and on so lubrication had to wait until Thursday.

And then there was more paint stripping on the 36, and miscellaneous tasks.

On Thursday I did the lubrication, and switched cars again so the standard two-car revenue train will be the 319 and 308. It's good to be able to change the consist every so often.

Three of the eight main journals on the 319 are still packed with waste, and they tend to run dry. So I've wanted to replace them with the more modern pad lubricators, like all the other journals have. So I went out to the material yard and extracted three pads from a 318 truck that hasn't been used since 1971, and then showed them to Bob Heinlein. The material still seems to be pretty soft and absorbent. I scraped off as much of the accumulated grease and junk as I could, and set them out in the sun to dry. It's probable they've absorbed water over the years, and we want them to dry out as much as possible. They will then be soaked in journal oil and installed.

Finally, I got to help Bob with testing the 1268, shown here at Jefferson with the 4290. Tim recently fixed the wiring problem, and it now seems to run correctly with one or more 4000's. This two-car train should be running on Saturday for Chicago Day.

Don't miss it!

Finally, here's some scenery. The creek is still high and running rather brown.

And John McKelvey has been working for a while with recovering plush seats in the car shop. Here some of his work is being tested and approved by our resident expert on comfort.

Big Switches

On Monday, the first task was to buy a load of nice clear poplar and transport it to the Museum. This will be used for making a complete set of tack molding strips. I am hoping to be able to replace the roof on the 319 this winter, and will get as much done in advance as possible. I also picked up some pieces for use on the 1797 by Tim.

Then there was a big switch move to put the 308 over the pit, so I could begin inspection. Since I was busy doing this by myself, I didn't take any pictures. Inspection has gone well so far.

So let's take a break and look at some contactors. These, of course, are just big switches for making the appropriate connections to regulate motor current. Here's a DB-15, the first successful contactor design for large current applications. This was designed about 1901 or so. It's sitting on the bench upside down, so these pictures have been inverted to show what it would look like when mounted inside the box.

Here, the door is closed.

When we open the door, we see the arc chutes and the contactor tips (white arrows)
which in this case are very worn. The yellow arrow points to the blow-out coil. Motor current flows through this coil to produce a magnetic field; when the contactor opens, the field produces a force pushing the arc into the arc chute on the left.

Here's a view of the bottom. The white arrow points to a hinge pin; the movable arm of the contactor is in two parts. The black arrow points to the arm which supports the lower contact tip. When the contactor closes, the arm moves slightly, producing a wiping motion at the contact surface. This should prevent the two tips from welding shut.

This particular contactor has no interlocks.

Finally, when the main coil is energized, the lower tip is raised and makes contact as seen here. When the coil is turned off, the lower tip falls by gravity, and the arc is blown into the arc chute. And this happens millions of times over the life of a 100+ year old device.

On the 308 we have a slightly more modern design, the DB-131. The box is open, but we did not disassemble the individual contactors, of course. You can see the simpler style contactor tips, I think. In this design the arc is blown out towards us, into the box.


Here's a view from underneath, showing the interlock design. These are auxillary connections to protect the control circuits. The white arrow points to a flat plate which makes the contact. When the contactor is energized, the (rusty) rod it's mounted on moves back. The left and middle interlocks are normal closed, the one on the right is normal open.

RPO Speedwagon - Part II

As promised, here are some of the photos Chuck Amstein sent in. As always, thanks, Chuck!

Some of the former mail clerks.

Mail pickup sequence:

This is a suitcase used by one of the former clerks, donated to IRM today.

CALLING YOUR BLUFFs - Dave's Depots - Council Bluffs, Iowa

See, all three off us can write bad puns! This past weekend, I was in Omaha for a model railroad operations event. I also found some time to tour the greater Omaha area. One stop was the Rock Island depot in Council Bluffs, now owned by the county historical society. The depot is in very good shape, and has some nice exhibits inside. Outside, you can tour some equipment, including a Union Pacific 4-8-4 and a Burlington 4-6-0.

A Good Mail Roll Model

Getting tired of the puns yet? Anyway, Sunday was a gorgeous day with perfect weather to close out RPO Weekend. There seemed to be a good crowd according to the operating crews. I even managed to witness one of the mail bag grabs, though my photo came out a bit late.
And what better complement to a blue sky than a red interurban car?
The 319 and 309 were in service all day under the care of Henry Vincent, Joel Ahrendt and Jim West. There are a couple of minor issues with the 319 that we'll want to fix before our next operation date on July 3rd, but overall the car is performing quite well and already seems to be a favorite of the operating crews. I think we'll keep her! There was even a visit from "Mr. and Mrs. Hicks Company," Randy and Margaret Hicks, who stopped in briefly to check up on the cars and discuss DB-15 contactors with Norm Krentel, who is helping with rewiring work on the 36.
I worked more on the 205 and managed to get most of the remaining bare metal on the car covered with primer, including the west end letterboard and the last of the side window piers (shown below right after priming). Below left is a shot of me wiping down the west end letterboard before priming courtesy of Mike Stauber.









I also took some time to go over recent progress on Michigan 28 with Norm, so watch for an item on that in a future issue of "Rail & Wire," and I painted a piece of cardboard with a sample of Indiana Railroad orange provided by Jon Fenlaciki to use in getting paint matched this week. With only a couple of spots on the 205 still in need of sanding and priming, we're basically ready to start with the first coat of orange as soon as the paint and rollers are procured.

Technical Difficulties

Sorry, friends, my home computer is deathly ill with a bad virus. So I'm posting this from work. The next few posts may not format properly, and there will be a delay in getting the news out. I'll let you know when it's fixed. Thanks for your patience.

RPO Speedwagon

This weekend IRM was celebrating Railway Post Office (RPO) Days with our RPO car and retired railway clerks. I didn't take any pictures because our friend and ace photographer Chuck Amstein was there. He has sent me a collection of pictures which I'll post as soon as I have a working computer at home.

The 309 and 319 were running in revenue service again both days. Here on Saturday are the cars, with Dan Buck the motorman and Randy Allegrezza the conductor, seen helping passengers off the train. Everything seems to have worked well.

In the woodshop, we have several people helping and watching as the Berlin sander works its magic on a newly-built door. You have to see this machine in operation to appreciate it.


I worked some more on the 36, stripping off more paint. Get ready for a boring series of pictures nearly identical to this one. And I took the defective contactor to the shop for disassembly and cleaning.

In other news, the B&G crew were hard at work on the street project; here we see the material being graded in preparation for new asphalt.

And the track crew was joined by a group from MTM who came out to help. Here they are in the process of regrading South Junction. In the middle, Tom Hunter provides direction. Thanks, guys!

Happy Birthday, Nick!

Last Friday was Nick's birthday, and on Saturday we received a cake from his sister. You'll notice it's elaborately detailed with his favorite blue engine. Nick, of course, is enjoying his second childhood and is pretty spry for a man of his age. We all wish him well, of course!

And if you're new to this blog, don't worry. Our pictures are usually not so revolting.

Contactors and Contractors

Last night we had lots of wind and rain. When I arrived in the morning, these aluminum panels from Barn 8 were lying in the spot where I usually park. I first checked to see whether they had blown off the roof of the building -- that wouldn't be good! But they were some pieces that had been replaced earlier this year, and had blown off the stack. So I dragged them back into place and put some scrap lumber on them.

The 319 and 309 will be running this weekend, weather permitting. So I didn't try to do any painting on the 319. We still need trainmen for Sunday.

The main activity today was testing all of the contactors for the 36. On the whole, they appear to be pretty good. There is one bad coil, one contactor is missing its tips, one is missing its arc chute, one is still disassembled, and many of the contactor tips are pretty worn, although they might be serviceable for a while if we don't operate the car too much. There are 13 contactors, but three of these are used only in parallel, and we certainly have enough good parts to make ten of them operable. At least they are now all sorted out and tagged. The bad coil was on #1, and that brings up an interesting point.

Contactor coils are wired in series, and #1 is active on every point. If coil #1 was open, the car would not operate, and if it was intermittently open, the car would not operate reliably. I do not know for sure, and more investigation will be required, but it is possible that the only real problem with this control system was one bad coil, and that failure to properly diagnose the trouble led to having the whole system taken apart.

I also started in earnest on removing the exterior paint. That got old after a while, so let's see what else might be going on.

Tim Peters, of course, is still hard at work on the 1797. Here he displays the results of applying epoxy to the roof, to give it a nice smooth and hard surface. He uses a combination of liquid and solid epoxies to get a mixture that has the consistency of pancake batter. It seems to work very well.

Now that the 714 is done, Jim Followell is continuing on the 451. But that's not his only project. He's also working on polishing the exterior of the Zephyr, most of which is inside Barn 2, with the last two cars sticking out. One of his helpers, a young man named Riley, was hard at work prepping the surface with steel wool.

I pondered the concept of steel-wooling an entire five-car train by hand for a few minutes, and somehow the task of stripping one short wooden car didn't seem quite so immense. By the end of the day it looked like this. Not shown is the plastic cover on the ground to collect all the paint chips for proper disposal.

I also walked out to the 321 to check on the tarp. A couple of blocks were loose because the older-type rope I was using appeared to be biodegradable, so those were retied. Otherwise everything appears to be fine.

Finally, let's see what's happening outside in defiance of the elements. Several Bakley Bros. employees were working on ripping up the rest of the doomed asphalt, and preparing the ground for new paving. Here the big backhoe is loading the old material into a dump truck; it is then hauled out to the Yard 12 area and dumped.

Meanwhile, another man in a small dozer is grading the area for new material.


And two precast concrete boxes for electrical service are being buried under the intersection of Depot and Central. Be sure to observe the many safety barriers B&G has put up; especially with all the rain, footing is treacherous in this area.