Wood Shop

Here are a few shots I got as I passed through the shop this week.

New Letterboard

One of the new letterboards has been installed on the north side of Lake Shore Electric 810.  When the remaining pieces are done on this side, it will be on to the roof work.  George Clark, Gerry Dettloff, and John Faulhaber worked on the project today.

Windows

Rich Witt continues to restore windows for the Chicago Aurora & Elgin 36.  It is not likely he will run out of work soon!

Seats

Our upholstery wizard, John McKelvey, is working on the seats for Chicago Rapid Transit 1797.  Plenty of repair work to be done, some totally recovered.

Plane Truth

Buzz Morisette was working on the CGW X 38 snow plow earlier but here, he is planing new wood destined for our dynamometer car, MILW X 5000.

Cleveland PCC

Rich Witt was back in the shop and helped out by applying finish paint to many of the parts needed on the roof of the 4223.

THE BIG NEWS

The BIG NEWS of the day was the delivery of this pallet of castings.  They are NEW brake shoes for the CSL 3142.  This is one of our service cars that is reliable and sees a lot of mileage every year.  As you might imagine, certain things have a way of wearing out.  Notable - the brake shoes.  This pic shows delivery of many shoes for that very car.  It marks a milestone in a five year odyssey to get new shoes.  We made a complicated pattern in our own shop, the pattern was lost at the foundry, the foundry fell on hard times and was re-organized, the pattern was found and revised after a test shoe was cast and sent to IRM, and FINALLY, we released the production order.  This project certainly belongs under the header "Nothing is Ever Simple".

As usual, there was a lot going on around the property, and a major effort to continue to set up and be ready for the first day of the Thomas Event, Friday August 18.  Here are a few pics I caught in our wood shop.

Arrested

Lorne Tweed and Eric Lorenz are working and doing some tests on a lightning arrestor for our Cleveland Transit System 4223.  On this PCC car there are a number of functions that get mounted to the new trolley boards on the roof.  Here is a lightning arrestor, electrically a LARGE capacitor.  It is connected to the hot lead at 600 volts DC and the other end is wired to the car frame or ground.  Under normal operations it acts as an open circuit, infinite resistance.  In the event of a lightning strike to the overhead or near infrastructure, it goes to zero resistance and provides a path to ground, hopefully safely dissipating the voltage before damaging the car or its occupants.

Paint

Lorne was busy painting the finish enamel on many of the components to comprise the roof mounted hardware.  That little casting in cream paint is a sort of elbow to be mounted on the metal roof and through which passes the 600 volt cable to power the car.

Beading

Buzz Morisette volunteered for an unexpected or last minute job, to make new custom profile very thin molding to be new window beading.  Jon Fenlaciki had removed the rear window of our first car, Indiana Railroad 65, and was working to refinish and reglaze it.  The old beading could not be salvaged.

Plan Ahead

We all know how important it is to plan ahead.  In this case that can only be done by looking behind at old plans and drawings.  It is really amazing how much technical data was saved for many of the cars in our collection.  Bill Wulfert is working on restoration of two sign boxes for Chicago Rapid Transit 1797 while Tim Peters studies an old print to resolve an issue.