319 Cleanup

Now that we can have lights in the 319 and the accident hazards have been removed from the center aisle, I thought the first thing I'd do is clean up the interior a little. I picked up all of the miscellaneous parts and stored them, made a pile of the five or six seat cushions which will need to be recovered, and then vacuumed the entire car. On the whole the interior looks very good. I plan to repaint most of it, but for now it's almost ready for service as is.

As seen at right, a lot of the paint is flaking off the window sills, since there's no primer. That will be a relatively easy job to fix. I will want to repaint the floor, since its current red paint is incorrect. I took two seat cushions home to be reupholstered, and moved two windows to the shop for stripping and repainting. I also worked on the third rail beams a little more and connected all of the cables. I need to get rubber hoses for the air connections to the sleet scrapers. It's possible I can get them to work, as they do on the 309, but I wouldn't put a lot of extra effort into it.

Then I spent some time examining the control parts in the 36, and looking under the car. We're missing some parts and I'm trying to track them down. I may have more to say about this later.
Update: the missing parts have been located: they were sent to an electrical repair firm in Cleveland for inspection, and are still there. We will be making arrangements to retrieve them. That's a big relief!!!

In other news, while visiting the car shop to get some tools and soak up BTU's, I noticed that Joel Ahrendt has done a great job of repainting the IT parts I left for him a while back. I'm not sure whether he wants to do more on them, so I left them there. Thanks, Joel!!!


And the 451 is over the pit, since it has the worst roof among the steel cars. Since Barn 11 has been approved for occupancy, we're hoping the 409 and 460 can go inside soon. Henry Vincent was working on replacing a sign box on the 409, and there were many others working in the shop. See the department blog for details.