Sunday update

Frank writes...

Sunday saw me back out at IRM for the afternoon. Things were pretty slow around the car shop, with the regular crew working on catching up with a few projects that had been awaiting attention for a while including some work on one of the spam cans. As for me, the weather was threatening rain so rather than run the 36 and 319 over to the inspection pit lead to do needle-chipping I decided to do some more work on painting the left side of the 150.

And here's a before-and-after example of the result. Fascinating, eh? Yeah, me neither. Oh well, it needed doing. I cleaned off and spot-primed the belt rail along the whole left side of the car (except for the rearmost 20' or so, which had already been done). The next step is to give this side of the car its coat of light yellow, after which the belt rail will receive its tile red stripe. This side of the car will also need one more coat of orange.

After I was done with that I wandered over to "help" Richard, Joel, Greg, and Doodlebug Bob, all of whom were taking a look at our IT Class B locomotive. The 1565 hasn't run in two or three years due to problems with its control system, problems which have been traced to faulty control resistors.

We can't get the correct type but we'll be able to modify available ones to fit. These are all original resistors and we've found on the CA&E cars that the control resistors can be a weak point in the Type M system. Actually I think they're a weak point in Westinghouse unit switch control, too, so I suppose it just goes with the territory. By the way, we were using flashlights because the trolley wire doesn't extend far enough down Track 64 to reach the Class B. One side effect of having so many operating cars in our barns is that many of the barn tracks, some of which were built with wire down only half their length, are practically full of operating cars. Even our own Track 84 has this issue and when we pull the four-car train out, the fourth car from the door has to back-pole the first few feet because the wire ends halfway down the car.

But I digress. And to digress further, Joel suggested a trivia question. What in the world is the box shown above? It's inside the Class B (the yellow arrow below points to it), mounted to the ceiling, and contains six light bulbs. No, it's not there to cast a soft, pleasing glow over the air compressors. Yes, there is a correct answer. If you win, you get a free photo of yourself standing next to the real live Illinois Terminal 1565 on your next regularly scheduled visit to IRM.