Wednesday Excitement

We'll start with some interesting property news -- repurposing the south half of the office building.

For many years it's been used as the Signal Dept. workshop and storehouse.  But they're planning to convert this into additional office space, so all the signal department property is being moved to the new Southwest Storage building.  

When I joined IRM, this was the only heated space on the property, and served as a workshop, meeting room, storage, office, and break room -- all at once.  It was pretty crowded!  Eventually this building will be replaced, but for now this is another step forward.

And in Car Dept. news, on Wednesday I started by putting a coat of black on the bottom surface of both third rail beams, and on the front of #4.

But a more important issue with the 460 is that both train doors need serious repair, as seen here.  This is the #2 door, and the bottom rail and the inner stile have come apart and need replacement.

I unscrewed the hinges, and Fritz and Rich helped me get the door down the steps and into the shop for rebuilding.

So that's my next project.  I started on making a new bottom rail for the door.

Meanwhile, several other projects were going on.  Jon Fenlaciki was making a new toolbox and set of wrecking tools for the IR 65.

They look brand new!  Actually, all of our cars that still have their tools (that haven't been stolen by railfans) look almost new also.  I have to wonder if these tools ever got used back in the old days.

And then several people are working on the Michigan car.  Here we see Rich and Fritz working on the ceiling of the front compartment.  

And work continues on the Green Bay car.  I hadn't noticed the fancy door plate before:

Tim continues to restore the 1268:

And finally, here's what a CA&E sleet scraper actually looks like.  You can see how worn down it is, and like many of them, it had new pieces of steel welded on, rather than making a new casting.

And I'm sure there were other things going on elsewhere on the property.  Even in the middle of winter, IRM is always a busy place!

The Latest on KGB&W 64

You'll be just as thrilled as the rest of us to know that restoration work on Kewaunee Green Bay & Western 64 is continuing in the Electric Car Shop! Many thanks go out to our intrepid cub reporter, Gregg Wolfersheim, who sends along this report of progress on our favorite railroad passenger coach.

Lots of progress has been made on the Green Bay car. Here, the grab irons are about to get primed on the east end of the car.

The end beam is in paint, ready for attachment to the car.

The north steps are painted and the grabs are in gray primer.

The beam is now fitted. Trying to line up the bolts with the holes in the wood and steel was a real challenge. But, we got it!

The large piece is the buffer plate. Smaller is a shim for the platform deck. Both in damp proof red primer.

The diamond plate deck is being needle chipped by Jack.

The old deck was rotted out so we made a new one out of leftover siding scraps. Here it is up side down awaiting primer.

The wood deck is now in paint, as well as the diamond plate in the background.

The doorway is green and the beam with buffer is done.

Where the south side step box is attached to the car, we had some rotten wood around the holes. Lag bolts are used to hold the steps up. Jack started to carve out the area trying to find solid wood. He found it, three hours later!

Using mostly hand wood chisels, about an inch and a half was removed. This area is only about16 inches by 6 inches. 4 wood dowels were glued into the old holes. When the new lag bolts are applied, we will drill part way into these dowels. Next, a new piece of hard wood was fitted in this area.

After the block was applied, new siding was nailed in place. Most of this won't be visible once the step box is installed.

Once again, Jack was needle chipping and then wire wheeling the other step box.

The platform deck is now carriage bolted down.

The steps are in primer.

The deck is freshly painted. Also, the left handrail with the hand brake wheel/shaft is getting painted in the foreground. Next will be installing all of this on the east end of the car.

The door has been prepped for painting.

Monday Report

On Monday I was working on the third rail beams, as usual.  As reported earlier, beam #4 (in front) got a coat of primer on Sunday, so I cleaned up the scraper and shoe assemblies,  attached them, and gave everything (except the bottom surfaces) another coat of primer.

 Then beam #3 got a nice coat of black paint.

If I may say so myself...

And other regulars were working on their projects.  Here Gregg has painted several new windows for the Green Bay car.

A quick view of the interior:

John and Fred worked on wiring up the controller at the #2 (west) end of the 306.  Some of the wires seemed to be too short for unknown reasons.

Later, Fred spent some time needle-chipping the side of the 28.  This car is really going to look nice.

Fritz was working earlier on the 306, and then on the 28.

And of course Tim was continuing work on the 1268, but I didn't get a picture.  Sorry!

Sunday Report

Frank writes…

With HHR firmly in the rear view mirror, Sunday turned out to be more of a normal workday, though Joel was still out for much of the afternoon gathering in Christmas lights. Unfortunately, I failed to take any photos of what was probably my most interesting project for the day: helping Richard diagnose and fix an issue with the 18's heat. The car has electric baseboard heaters that work quite nicely, but the handful of times I've run them, they've never shut off until I manually turn them off. This suggests an issue with either the heat contactor (which is a "fail on" design) or the thermostat.

It turned out that the thermostat fuse wasn't making good contact because the clips were widened out and corroded, so we fixed that and then shorted across the thermostat contacts to confirm the contactor works as it should. Success! The next step will be to testing the thermostat itself, and to do that I'll need to turn the heat on and hang out in the car for a while until it warms up. Hopefully, that will be sometime soon. Thanks to Richard for his work on this little project!

In other news, I put primer on the portions of the CSL air compressor wagon that had been cleaned up by Gregg. These will get a coat of green the next time I'm out. I also put a second coat of white on the lettering, so that's done. Dan F has gotten a quote from a company that can replace the solid rubber tires with authentic rubber replacements. The cost, should we decide to do it, will be $1980 for all four wheels, plus shipping costs. Re-tiring this thing is entirely dependent on donations - without donations specifically for this purpose, the new rubber tires won't happen. If you'd like to see the wheels fixed so AX545 can be towed out for display now and again, send in a check with "RCAR" (Electric Car Department donor-restricted fund) on the memo line and send us an email so we know what you have in mind.

In other news, I spent some time looking for spare parts out in the field, and measured how much extra space there is on Track 84 in case we decide to put AX545 on display at the west end of that track next to the X4 (the answer is about 6-8 feet, or barely enough). But what else was going on?

Richard is back at work on his wintertime project of late, the Barn 8 rail display. Here we see the beneficiaries of his painting activities on Sunday. At right is a piece of rail painted to differentiate the head, web, and base of the rail for educational purposes. The other piece of rail is a real rarity that was discovered in the corner of the Signal Shop, where it had likely been squirreled away years ago by Johnson. It's a piece of pear-head rail dating to 1874 and it's marked for the B&O RR. It turns out that the B&O was one of just two railroads in the mid-1870s that had its own rolling mill for rail, located in Cumberland, Maryland (the other railroad was the Philadelphia & Reading, for what that's worth).

Over in the paint booth were more items for Richard's display. These are examples of - if memory serves - 40-, 60-, 80-, and 100-pound rail, which will be labeled appropriately to demonstrate the variety of sizes in which rail comes.

Out in the barn, Good Nick was taking a break from presidenting to assemble a rebuilt tray of batteries for the CTA 2200s. Here, he's cleaning up threads where the cables attach to the lugs.

I got a chance to speak briefly with Mike S, who is responsible for most of the progress on cleaning up and painting the air compressor wagon. This past week, he painted the entire floor in the 3142 himself, as shown above.

And while the aforementioned 3142 was on the inspection pit, the weekend's "mechanical crew" of Brian, Jimmy, and Will tackled some issues that have cropped up with our most-used streetcar. They removed a couple of levers from the brake rigging, I believe to replace the bushings, and were also looking at some other stuff under the car I'm less sure about. Above, Brian would never look down upon lowly inspection pit workers, but nevertheless he sent the above photo taken of Will looking straight up through one of the 3142's inspection hatches.

In other news, more work was done on New Jersey 4, the Newark PCC. The last wheel to be replaced has bolts located too close to the hub to fit an impact socket on, making them difficult to remove (on the other wheel bolted in like this, we ended up having to torch off two of the bolts). The crew was able to find a thin-wall socket and remove three of the bolts with that, but it wasn't impact-rated. We expected it to fail and it did, so the crew will tackle the three remaining bolts next time.

CERA Visit in 1988

In 1988 the CERA paid a visit to IRM, and we put on a show, as we usually do.  The main line had almost reached Seemann Road, but not quite.  Among other things, Jim Johnson brought out his panoramic camera and staged a picture of the attendees, of whom I believe there were almost 300.  And this picture has recently been hung in the new shop extension (Lean Zero).  It's about six feet wide!

Friday Photos

Another brief report from the car shop, where progress never stops.  At least not for very long. 

I realized that I needed to swap cylinders for the last two beams in the current set.  The cylinders are not all the same; they have different ways of providing the air pipe connection, and so the one I had mounted on #3 needed to be replaced, so the pipe will point in the correct direction.  And I also cleaned up the next cylinder, and checked that it would fit onto the beam correctly.  Anyway, after changes were made, both beams got a coat of primer.

Next time, I'll start on black paint.

Meanwhile, Tim continues to make steady progress on the 1268.  Here we see shiny new paint on the new siding on the south side of the car.

And Gregg is making progress on the east end of the Green Bay car too.

But wait, there will be one more...