Shovel All the Coal In

Gotta keep 'er rollin'! The steam team was busy loading coal and water into the 1630 today, so that's a very good sign! (R) I just missed showing the coal dropping into the tender, but that's the way it goes. It will really be exciting to see steam return to the Museum this year! The steam guys deserve a lot of credit for all the work they've put into making this possible.



There are eight windows on the 319 that didn't get stripped in time to be painted with the rest of the car last May. Jamie Kolanowski has generously offered to spray them for me, so today I finished removing and masking them and took them over to Barn 2. I then got some spare windows from the container to fill the holes. These old windows from the 318 don't look like much, but it's just temporary. I promise.

A number of new display signs (known as "Kevin signs" in honor of the late Kevin McCabe, who designed and made the first set) have been produced, and are sitting in the car shop waiting for installation. Here's the one for the 36.

Ed Oslowski has been hard at work on the interior of IT 277, as seen here.

The front compartment is nearly ready to paint.

In the main compartment, Joel has installed all of the baggage racks, and the racks for the front compartment are ready for installation.

Mostly I worked on the 319's #1 vestibule. The best way to strip old paint from a pipe is to wrap a chain around it and pull it back and forth. I can't take a picture of myself actually doing this, but I hope you get the idea. This is an old Navy technique that I learned from some of the several IRM members who used to be sailors. They probably used bigger chains, on bigger pipes!

And then I did some more painting with white primer. The area around and behind the piping for the controls takes a lot of attention.

I also spent an hour or so installing the rest of the repainted windows in the 518; we're planning to paint the side of the car this week. And Bob Opal gave an impromptu seminar on FRA rules, which was quite informative and useful.

Here's an interesting operation. Max needed to pull three-phase wiring through a conduit along the length of most of Barn 4. His truck is parked out on Depot St., and the winch (red arrow) is pulling a rope through a couple of pulleys, and pulling the wire into the box (green arrow). The wire was being fed from a reel back at the east end of the shop by Max and Rod, several hundred feet away. Bob Sunderlin ran the winch and was instructed by radio. Just like downtown!