Saturday Report

Another Saturday, and guess what?  There was lots going on, too much to remember, but you'll just have to be satisfied with what follows.

Buzz was mostly working on the new parts for the diner, as seen here.  They are, to put it mildly, excellent.

But he was also asked to make up some lettering decals for North Shore car 757, so I came along to help find the car and unlock it.  Here he is getting a picture of the number "7".  He pointed out that the interior 7 is much different from the exterior 7.  Who knew?

Zach is continuing to work on the interior of the 757, even though he lives near Indianapolis.   He may be getting help from others, I'm not sure.  In any case, it looks great!

Keith was polishing up several whistles.

It looks like all of the windows on the MPB are now installed.  Now all we need is doors.

John Sheldon continues his work on the 306.  Mostly he was removing the cement floor installed at Shaker.  It's a horrendous job, but he keeps working at it.

Ed Woytula was needle-chipping parts of the truck for the Cleveland PCC.  He wanted me to point out that Chuck Meter was doing most of this work.  I just happened along at the wrong time.

I had wanted to look at the heater circuits in the 451.  The heat in the smoker compartment isn't working.  Unfortunately the circuits appear to be nearly inaccessible.  The plates are held on with Phillips machine screws rusted in place, and I was unable to remove them.  So that project is on hold.  

I spent most of my time attaching hardware to the side doors.  These were replaced several years ago, but several parts were never installed.  This little gizmo holds the door open, for instance, but it has to be in exactly the right place, or it's worse than useless.  So that was an entertaining project.

And here are a couple more:

Also, we need to install a switch to isolate the batteries when not in use.   Linda Evans helped by cleaning it up, along with several other parts like this.

Finally, I painted both sides of the plates for the #2 end.

Well, that's it until next time.  See you soon!

Resistance Is Futile

Work in the shop continued on Tuesday.  I'm still working on the end plates for the 451, as well as the low-voltage control system.  The second shift had looked at it while I was away, and determined that at least one of the resistors was open.  As a result, the batteries are not being charged.

Here's what it looks like on the (only partly) accessible side:

The large wire-wound resistor on the left is indeed open.  I removed it and left it in the shop so a replacement can be ordered.  Note that it has an adjustable center tap.  The four horizontal resistors all measured OK.

Note: According to the GE data book, the vertical resistor should be 19 ohms.  Of the horizontal resistors, the second should be 25 ohms, but I measured it to be 5.  There may be other parts of the circuit that affect the reading, so it should be removed and retested.  The others all matched the specified values.

Also, for the defective resistor, one of the wire connections at the top is damaged and needs to be fixed, as you can perhaps barely see. 

I removed the wood blocks at the #2 end and painted them both sides with primer.

Meanwhile, John Sheldon and Gerry were working on the 306 some more.   Gerry welded in several rivets to hold one of the side windows.

And here's what it looks like from the outside:

Tim, of course, continues working on the 1754.  Besides making new seats in the shop, the floor is pretty much finished, and some of the seat frames are being repaired, with wood replaced as necessary.

Speaking of resistors, John is also working on repairing and repainting heaters for the 306.

Here Tim helps him with some body and fender work on the heater cover.

And outside, a contractor was installing more windows in the MPB.

Monday Shop Report

Jon Fenlaciki sends us a report on what's happening today in the shop.  This is almost in real time....

He's removing the wrinkles in the newly-installed canvas on the 65 with a steam iron.  Wet towels are in place to start soaking the canvas.

Tim continues to manufacture seat frames for the 1754.

John Sheldon is sand-blasting car heater frames for the 306.

Hey, Kids!

If you and your parents are ever in the Biloxi area, you'll want to check out the Model Train Museum in nearby Gulfport.  It's a real hoot.

This is a volunteer-run 501(c)3 organization, like some others you may have heard of, and there is no required admission, although they suggest a donation of $5 for adults and $3 for kids.  It's located in a fairly limited area of an industrial park, and no room to expand.

There's toy trains of all sorts, including Lego.

There's a large collection of older trains on display, but with little explanatory labeling.

Outside, there's more, with layouts of every size on display.

The place was packed with families, and everybody seemed to be having a good time.  There are several park-type trains providing rides:

Including some self-powered cars like these:

They make use of almost every available square foot of space.

It was interesting for things that we might want to include and other things we will want to avoid when IRM develops its own model railroading display.

For me, though, the highlight of the museum was this Erector Zeppelin in like-new condition.  I'd never seen one in person before, or even a good photograph.  It's a fascinating part of Gilbert history.

Moving Day

What could be more fun than moving all your possessions from one location to another?  The only thing better is to spend the day moving somebody else's stuff!  And IRM has lots of opportunities for that -- that's why today a good number of us put in some time to move a collection of important documents into storage for safekeeping.

The late Roy Benedict was one of the most respected authorities on transit of all sorts.  Sadly, I never met him in person, but we corresponded via email and he was very helpful with information and pictures on a wide variety of subjects.  He left his vast collection of material to IRM, and it was up to us to move it from the B&G building, where it had been moved for lack of any other alternative, to a climate-controlled storage facility nearby.

Here we are at B&G in the morning.  There's not a lot of room left.

This is an example of the detailed information that Roy collected.

There are hundreds of boxes of material, including all the financial records of the South Shore railroad.

I can only imagine the people at Office Depot were glad to see Roy walk in the door!

Or, would you like some lasagna?

Here's a gigantic ledger book from the Chicago Lake Shore and South Bend (which means it's pre-Insull).

They had vast numbers of employees writing everything down carefully in ink.

And the collection in the storage bin keeps growing and growing.  We certainly got a good workout.

Eventually all of this will be inventoried and sorted.  This might be a good time to remind you that we could always use more volunteers in the Strahorn Library to catalog and care for our vast and growing vaster collection of railroad-related historical documents of all sorts.  It's something you can do without getting oil, grease, or paint on yourself!

This all went more smoothly than I expected.  Several people offered use of their vans or trucks to help move all the material, so it was all done very efficiently.  And we were done a little before 3PM.  

Finally, a group portrait.

To save time, we just did it twice.

Meanwhile, of course, many of the usual museum projects continued.  The only one I got a picture of was the Cleveland PCC group with the second truck, as seen here.

I also went over to the Steam Shop to mark up the 309 bearing, and I had intended to take some pictures of all the work going on there, but ran out of time.  The shop was certainly a beehive of activity.  So that was another enjoyable and productive day.