My biggest Fan!

A day later than I expected- Yesterday, 6/19/10 Leon, Wayne, Paul and I went to BOONTON N.J., the home of many former LIRR Ping Pong coaches and a few other cars.
From what I gathered yesterday and through the years, These cars were brought down some 30 + years ago and were soon turned into a small shopping mall. A few of these cars had their vestibules welded together to form a weathertite entrance from 1 car to another.  One was an ice cream parlor while 2 were a fashion shop for the ladies. I received an email a couple of weeks ago from John Zanone who is in charge of scrapping these cars. The ownership through the years has been convoluted but the last owner that we know of was Eric Strohmeyer who graciously allowed us to salvage the brake stand in the former brake test car.
We met up with John around 9am having left Oyster Bay at 7:20 for the 1+1/2 hour drive down. When we arrived, theere was a group from the NJ United Railway Historical Society salvaging wood and fixtures from a former CNJ Blue Comet observation car across the tracks.
We started right in removing the parts that we came down for.
A badly needed toilet (ok, bring on the crappy jokes) for our lavatory, a cup dispenser and trash chute, a porcelain cistern drain, a spare bathroom door window (stained glass for your pleasure), 3 luggage racks for spare parts, 1 sign holder for a friend, 25-40 lamp globes and fixtures for us-horsetrading-a friend, and FINALLY.......5  VERY HEAVY ceiling fans. It must have taken less time to remove all of the other parts than it did to remove these 5 fans.
We first had to figure out how to get to the 4 mounting bolts which took me almost an hour. Then we had the knock off years and layers of thick paint to get the collars knocked down to get to these 4 rusty nuts.
We then took about 40 minutes to remove 1 fan. The other 4 took us about 1/2 hour each, so that dragged our day until about 2pm. A quick 1/2 hour lunch and we were back on the road for our (supposed) 1+1/2 hour treck back to unload in Oyster Bay.
Paul & I made it back to Oyster Bay at 5pm while Leon &Wayne returned at 5:30. We unloaded and then went our own ways home.
A very long day for me-I was up at 5am, and a very dirty but satisfying day for all.
The only regrets we had were that there was NO WAY we could have salvaged the "owl eye" windows on the end walls as they were riveted with 1 inch rivets and we would have needed the plasma cutter and we had to pass up on 2 walkover seat frames as we ran out of room in our 2 vehicles!
I am posting a few shots that I took yesterday
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Gary