At the Health Club

The weather outside keeps getting colder and colder, so it was another good day to stay inside and work out by lifting weights at the East Union Health Club.   Did I mention that dues are very reasonable?

 

Let's limber up those muscles by assembling a couple of third rail beams.  As you lift the parts into position, remember to bend your knees, not your back.  Then you get to spend plenty of time finding, sorting, and tightening nuts and bolts.  They say it's "aerobic", whatever that means.

To relax, you'll want to make the little wooden plates that cover the bolts holding the heavy shoe assembly.  I imagine they are supposed to prevent flashovers to the truck frame.

 And then the parts get another coat of primer as needed.  We've decided the parts below the beam don't really need to be painted.  The original beams don't seem to have any paint on those parts.  Next time we can start painting them black.

Tim helped with some of the heavy lifting, but was mostly working on the seats for the Bowling Alley.  Frank Kehoe and Jim Heinlein were working with him, but I didn't get a picture.  Sorry!

And you can see the sparks fly as he grinds down some more parts.

Once the third rail beams were done, I did some more surface prep and painting in the vestibule.  These vestibules are small, so a single space heater can easily warm them up to a good temperature for primer. It will be nice when this can start turning blue. 

And then I took the flag box to the shop to finish stripping it, and put on a coat of primer.

And I guess everybody needs to take a break now or then.  Here's an anonymous entry in our modern art contest.

Say, you probably made a New Year's resolution to get more exercise.  Better get down to the health club toot sweet!

The Secret Science of Sleet Scraping, Part II - Pantographs

David writes......

In Randall's original article on sleet scraping for third rail and trolley pole electric railway properties, a commenter asked about pantographs.
 

I've read that the Pennsylvania Railroad normally operated with the rear pantograph up. During sleet storms and other conditions where the overhead could ice over, the front pantograph would be raised, but cut out from the electrical system, so it could knock off ice on the wire before the rear, power-collecting pantograph came into contact. Above, here is a photo from Marty Bernard showing both pans up on a GG1 at Potomac Yard, near Washington, D.C.

 

This also appears to have been the case for the South Shore, though some older photos show cars in good weather condition running with the front pantographs up, while others show the rear pantographs up.  Could one of our readers enlighten us?

In the photo above, we see a standard St. Louis light rail car. Note the pantograph in the front, just behind the headlight. This is a sleet scraping pantograph. These sleet cutters appear on some Siemens light rail cars . They were developed by the late Fred Perry when he served as a consultant for the Metrolink system in St. Louis. Of course, Fred was a friend of IRM and many other traction museums until his untimely death about ten years ago. St. Louis, as I well know from living there for nine years, gets a lot of ice storms compared to other parts of the country. Such storms create havoc on the streets and the transit systems. Fred directed the installation of a spare pantograph on the front of one of the Metrolink cars. The pantograph was not wired to collect power, but was wired into a resistor, which in turn would head the collector blades on the top of the pantograph. The front pantograph was also apparently tuned to place more pressure on the overhead. The end result was a heated sleet scraper that would clear the overhead before the power-collecting pantograph came into contact with the wire.

According to Fred, when he told me this story at the Museum of Transportation years ago, the Siemens engineers were horrified at first when they heard that this modification had been made. After they inspected it up close, it became an optional feature on some of their light rail cars. I know some of the cars used by the Utah Transit Authority here in Salt Lake have the same sleet scraping pantograph. In the photo above, we see a similar setup. I've noticed that not all of the UTA cars have these. Having lived here for about 18 months, I can say we don't seem to get as many ice storms as I experienced in St. Louis.

So folks, there you have it! The complete science of sleet scraping!

Cold Hard Facts

The fact is, it was a good day to stay inside.  The bitter cold, biting wind, and blinding sun outside were brutal.  But at IRM we're lucky to have a nice warm shop to work in, so we made a lot of progress on making new third rail beams for the 36, among other projects.

In the morning I even had a new helper for a while.  John Heid has been a long time member and blog reader, but was living in New Jersey until recently, so he hasn't been volunteering for very long.  He's a member of the Steam Team, which is fine, but due to the Board meeting there was nobody in the steam shop in the morning so he wandered over to the car shop.  And I put him to work wire-wheeling third rail parts.

Wire-wheeling is done out in the barn, but it isn't quite as cold and of course there's no wind so it's not bad.  John did a very good job on the first two or three parts that had to be prepared.  Thanks!

Don't worry, the parts are not actually this blurry.  If only I knew someone who could reliably take good pictures....  Sorry, Chuck, that was a joke, of course.

Larry Stone was out again today and he and I worked on the wooden beams.  We did some more drilling, chiseled out mortises as needed, and checked that the parts will fit together as planned.

Then we started painting the wood and the cylinders with first primer.

So by the end of the day they looked like this.  Next time I can bolt them together and put on another coat of primer to seal everything.

But probably the most dramatic project recently completed is painting of the markers for the 24.

Tim can be justly proud of this accomplishment.  As he says, nobody has seen anything like this for the last hundred years.  And Rod did all of the machining to make this possible, but prefers to avoid the limelight.

The next step is making the handles to rotate the markers.  The lights are mounted on the roof at the ends, and the shafts extend down through the ceiling of the open platform vestibules.  Then you have these handles, as seen in a catalog illustration from 1898 or so.  And Rod is machining the parts to make it all work.  It doesn't get any better than this!

The other regulars, such as Buzz, Victor, Rich, and several others were out working on various projects, so it doesn't get lonely.  But of course, we can always use more help.  Come on out!

The Secret Science of Sleet Scraping

Ice is an insulator.  So if ice or sleet forms on the third rail or trolley wire, as often happens during the winter, it can bring an electric railroad to an embarrassing and expensive halt.  To solve this problem, we need the aid of Science.  So if you like scientific details, keep reading!

We shall, of course, start with the CA&E.  When the line was built in 1902, nobody had much experience with keeping a third-rail interurban running. In the early days they tried putting a tank of either brine or calcium chloride solution in the front vestibule and letting it drip through tubes onto the third rail.  This was a real mess, as you can imagine, and it damaged the rails, the insulation, and so on.  The third rail fixtures themselves were in a state of flux at this time, but by about 1913 or so the road had settled on the third rail beam design that was used until the end.  This design includes pneumatic sleet scrapers.

Here's what the standard sleet scraper looks like.  The cylinder is fed through a flexible hose, and the piston pushes the cast iron scraper shoe down onto the third rail.  There's one on each side of each truck, and all four operate in unison.

The cylinder looks like this, upside down.  The shaft goes down through a slot in the wooden beam, and the shoe is bolted onto the bottom.  You can see the spring that pushes the piston up when air is released.  I meant to measure the vertical travel, but it's about 6".

The shoe looks like this.  They tend to be pretty worn down.  The shoe has an electrical connection so it will act as a current collector when in use.

The scrapers on the lead car are controlled by a valve to the right of the brake valve.  On the wood cars there's just a simple on-off valve as seen here.  

On the steel cars, however, there's a more complex valve that uses a second brake handle, of the same type as the M-23 motorman's valve.  This is more than a simple on-off valve, but I'm not sure how it works since we never use it.  I must confess that David was basically correct about this, although I doubt this was actually a motorman's brake valve of some sort.

Because of the great force the pneumatic cylinders could exert, I would assume it was necessary for the motorman to raise the scrapers wherever there was a gap in the third rail.

The CRT/CTA has always been able to use simpler means of scraping the rail, largely because traffic is much more frequent on the rapid transit lines, and during sleet storms they would send out extra trains just to keep the rails clear. Here's what one of the more modern scrapers looks like.  At the top is a long leaf spring, which drives down the scrapers at each end.  Ordinarily these are kept in the up position, as here, by means of a lever.  By turning the handle, the scrapers drop into position.  Of course, they are then always down and cannot be raised while the train is in motion.  But that is evidently not necessary with the flexible scrapers used here.  I think most of our rapid transit cars had these scrapers on only one truck.  

As for other third-rail equipment at IRM, the Michigan Electric car had pneumatic scrapers similar to the CA&E's mounted on the front truck only.  The Com Ed 4 and the S motor used an under-running third rail where sleet would not be an issue.

But of course sleet can be a problem with trolley wire as well as third rail.  The greater flexibility of trolley wire (particularly simple suspended) makes it easier to knock the ice off, but most cars can have only one pole up and you have to remove the ice and collect current at the same time.  Somewhere we have examples of sleet-cutting trolley wheels and I'll try to get a picture of one.  It looks sort of like a miniature turbine wheel.

Here's an interesting solution from the Illinois Terminal.  Combine 277 has a trolley pole mounted near the front of the car with a special sleet cutting shoe.  During the winter, a retriever would be mounted so the front pole could be raised.  This would enable the rear pole to collect current reliably.  Of course, if the front pole dewired, a crewman would have to climb onto the (presumably icy) roof to take care of it!  We are certainly lucky that IRM can just shut down during the winter.

Grid Project Completed

Now it can be revealed: the roof-mounted marker lights for our CRT open platform car 24 (1024) are essentially complete.  They're in the process of being painted, as you can see, but that's a simple if time-consuming process.  These fixtures were removed about 1915 or so, and none of them survive.  The new fixtures were re-engineered based on photographs such as the one seen in the picture.

Tim made the wooden forms for the brass castings, and Rod did the machining on the rough cast parts.  He estimates it would cost about $5,000 to produce these commercially.  And we wanted to wait until today so Frank Kehoe could see them in person, since he's put in a lot of effort on this project.

This picture was taken on Saturday.  It's unfortunate that the beautiful brass castings have to be painted, but that's the way it often happens.  It will be exciting to see these in service!

 

In the morning I finished the grid box project.  The remaining old beam was cut apart with the help of Tim's Sawzall, and then the new beam was placed and all the bolts installed and tightened up.

Then the platform was removed, and I collected the old parts and cleaned up.  I checked the electrical connections to make sure they were still tight.  I didn't find any loose wires, but I did find a loose bolt sitting on top of one of the grids.  That wouldn't be good!

And the afternoon was mostly spent in prepping various parts of the vestibule.  This part of the bulkhead now has first primer.  There are many nooks and crannies, so it takes a while.

And Gerry showed me the new 40x40 tarp they've acquired for the Electroliner.  Once the first unit is over the pit, the tarp can be placed over it and fastened down to keep the heat in for people working in the pit.  There should be enough room for the motors in both motor trucks at this end to be removed for rebuilding.  Then, presumably, the train can be wyed and the other end get the same treatment.  The center truck has no motors.  So I promise we'll be keeping an eye on this project.

CCW 300 Video

As reported on RyPN, an excellent color movie of fan trips on the Charles City Western including our #300 in action has been recently posted here.  It's all good, but the 300 segment is from about 4:05 to 7:15.  Enjoy.

I've Got a Secret

 ... but it's being saved for last.  Meanwhile, Larry Stone was out to help again today, so we concentrated on projects for which a second person is a definite asset.  In the morning, we worked on the new wooden beams to support the grid boxes. Photography here is difficult, to say the least.  One beam was easier to replace, so it was installed and the new bolts have all been put in place with their washers and nuts.  The nuts have not been tightened, of course, but at least now the boxes can't just be accidentally knocked off the platform.

The second beam is much harder to remove, due to the bolts sticking out of it, so I'll have to cut it in half.  The new one should then be easy enough to install.  So this project is going well.

In the afternoon we worked on the last two third rail beams for the 36.   All of the major holes were drilled.

None of our drill presses have a sufficient range to enable the vertical holes through the beam to be drilled in one pass, so we have to start from both ends and hope they meet in the middle with minimal offset, in the same way that the Moffat Tunnel was dug, for instance.   As they say, two heads are better than one, so the holes we drilled all met with an imperceptible error. 

 The castings need to be wire brushed before they are painted, but we'll save that for next week.  Here you can see that the bolts at least line up for attaching the sleet scraper cylinder.   Man, these parts are heavy!  I cannot explain how they can have gotten heavier over the past twenty years or so, but it's true.  

And of course many other projects were progressing.  Buzz Morrisette is working on making new roll signs for the 24, and in the process he also graciously agreed to make a single panel for our Lake Shore Electric car 150, since we don't have all of the roll sign mechanism.  I made a tentative drawing of a destination based on the available photographs. Buzz improved the artwork considerably, and it will look like this, though with white (transparent) letters on a black background.  And the sign box itself is backlit.  So that will be nice.  Then the sign box can be mounted on the front of the 150. 

Explanation: An LSE car running west from Cleveland in the early days could run through Toledo, and then over the Detroit United Railway to Detroit, taking about six hours to make the trip.  Between Ceylon Junction and Fremont on the LSE there were two routes: a northern route through Sandusky and a southern route through Norwalk.  So this sign tells you what you need to know to reach your destination. 

And Bill was working on light fixtures for the ceiling of the 24, so they look as good as new, if not better.  Lots of other stuff was going on, but I didn't get a picture.  So you'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, a significant milestone has been reached on one of our Car Dept. projects, but for reasons which I am not allowed to explain, we are forbidden to reveal it until Tuesday.  So you will just have to wait until then for pictures and details.  Ha ha!

Grando, Nix, et Cetera

Over the weekend the Chicago area got about a foot and a half of global warming dumped on it, one of the bigger snowstorms in recent memory.  But IRM has the tools and the talent to take care of these things, so the property was well plowed out on Monday, and everything was more or less open for business on Tuesday.  Thanks, guys!!!

I started heating the car up, and worked on sanding in the vestibule and other tasks before putting a first finish coat on the remaining arm rests in the vestibule.  There's not much left to do.

Since the ceiling is completely painted, the cord for the conductor's valve was reconnected and tested.  But while the paint is drying, let's see what else is going on today.

 Jeff Brady (not shown) was welding up the sheet metal covering for the wall of the baggage compartment in the 28.  Here we see the custom brake for bending the steel, with two pipes as handles.

 

Tim is working on the long seat frames for the 24, as mentioned before.

The 2100's have been moved from 2 to 6, where the guys are installing grab irons and I don't know what else.  Across the aisle, it's Line Car City!

And Gerry is working on the D-13.  A few weeks ago, I posted a recording of the whistle.  Did you wonder why it sounded so bad?  There was a large wasp's nest stuffed inside!  With that gone, it should work much better.

And I slapped some black paint on the grid box beams.  In front of them are some of the parts Gerry is finishing for the dump motor.

Well, enough railfanning, back to the 36.  Once the smoker was nice and toasty, the entire floor got a first coat of finish brown.

Here you can see the difference between the dry primer and the (wet) finish paint.  The floor certainly looks better than it used to: see the last picture here.

(By the way, the title of this post means "sleet, snow, and the rest".  It's a quote from Orff's Carmina Burana which I happen to be rehearsing these days.  Quite appropriate.)

Get Your Hands Off Our Goose!

From Colorado, our friend Joseph Becker reports on an argument over the legal possession of an historic artifact, Galloping Goose #5 from the RGS.  There's a lengthy article in the current issue of the Dolores Star which you should be able to access, at least for a day or two, here.

Briefly, the town believes it still has legal ownership of the Goose, whereas the historical society (and before that the Rotary Club) have been maintaining, restoring, and operating it for more than 50 years, believing it was theirs.  This is an example of how legal agreements from long ago can come back to haunt you.  Hmm, where have we heard that before?

I'm not aware of anything at IRM whose ownership might be disputed like this, but you never know.