Well,
we took another turn for the good as we went back to working on our turntable.
We had 5 volunteers on board during a HOT and sunny day yesterday. I figured it will take a few more weeks of this weather to get our blood thinned out for the season.
If you remember from the last turntable posting, the bridge had a bad bind as we turned it around, so we needed to back off the bridge and remove a couple of ring rails in order to fix the problem.
We wound up un-spiking and removing 3 ring rails. After shaving down about 2 dozen ties, we broke for lunch, then returned to re-spike 2 of the 3 ring rails back into place.
I'm sure that we could have done all 3, but we were fortunate enough to have had a site visit by some of the board members of our local National Railway Historical Society chapter, the L.I. Sunrise Trail chapter.
The president, Steve Quigley came home from Concord California (nice place-BTW) on the red-eye in order to make the visit, and we were very excited to see them. They presented us with a check for a large sum to help us start the steel work on our Ping Pong coach #7433. It needs some metal work where the roof sheet meets the side sheets.
I sent a diagram out to a RR Tie Manufacturer to get a quote on our needs for the turntable bridge and I hope to have that answer in a couple of weeks to present to the board of OBRM.
We do have a grant to buy and install the ties and if you remember, we have already brought back on site, the motor and electrical resistance bank as well as the split ring electrical collector for the top of the arch. We still need to get back the original control stand and finish the motor frame assembly.
Then it will be a heavy rebuild of the turntable. The town of Oyster Bay will need to get LIPA in in order to erect a new power pole west of the turntable and exactly 180 degress from the east pole that exists on site and to also give us a meter with 4 115 volt drops once the arch is in place. This will provide us with 460 volts to the motor.
Next week we will have on site, our locomotive rebuild contractyor Scott Lindsey from Steam Operations Corp. to start the running gear re-build of our favorite G5s LIRR steam locomotive #35 (but #1 in our hearts!)
Gary
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I neglected to write a blog for Saturday May 8th because I did not attend the work day.
ReplyDeleteI will state that this day WAS National Train Day and that we had our 1st annual, open house.
We dedicated the restoration of our Worlds Fair Alco cab to 3 of our volunteers who have passed away in the last few years, George Hunka, Pete Taormina and James Carley-who btw, was a friend of mine and who would have been my brother in law as I am marrying his sister in August. This was a very personal day for his family who came out en masse for the dedication and had a wonderful time. They understood why I wasn't able to be there with them, but it still was a bit of a letdown for me. Thankfully, I was attending the communion of my nephew, so I still was able to enjoy myself that day.
Gary