Restoration Notes: A Day in the Life of a Railway Museum.

Saturday, March 27, 1999

An Oak, Timing problems and Injectors, an update from Greg Ramsey

First off, let me apologize for not posting more frequent weekly notes. March has been an extremely rough month for me. Most exciting news is that the mighty oak that has stood in the way (both physically and figuratively) of progress on the tail track has finally fallen. Our only impediment to progress now is ourselves. Many thanks to Greg Gneier, Linda Barth and Tom Breckner for shepherding this effort through the bureaucracy. We also owe a debt of thanks to all the other City employees who have been instrumental in this milestone. Speaking of City folk, Recreation and Parks has a new General Manager. She is Ellen Oppenheim, and hails from the Bay area. Welcome to LA and we look forward to working with her.

Back at the Park, a lot of work has been going on inside the M.177. We still haven't got the engine to spin continuously on air and believe that the cam shaft is out of time. This past Saturday, Bryan removed the oil piping and the timing gear case. We never found all the timing marks indicated in the book, but are pretty well convinced that we are right. We'll probably reassemble things next weekend and hopefully have solved the problem. We also have the modified Nash distributors in hand. If I didn't know better, I could never have been able to tell you they weren't the originals.

The "Charley Atkins" started acting up two weekends ago. When I arrived at the park, Gordon and Bryan were telling me that they thought they had a governor problem. I opened up the valve cover and quickly discovered the injector rack was sticking. I subsequently tracked the fault to the #5 injector which had frozen up. Brian Moore and I pulled it out that day, but I was unable to get a replacement until this past weekend. Fortunately, it went in easy and I had Charley back in service for training that weekend. Danny and crew continue to make progress on the crossover switch.  They have even started to install some of the rubber grade crossing material. (See Danny's report below)

Greg

"Our Gang", an update from Daniel Price

This weekend was a loss in terms of track work. Instead, the MofW Dept. was diverted to repairing the fences in the Caboose Train passenger boarding area. This was in preparation for next weekend's operations. This task had to be done as the fence was slowly falling apart in front of us (gates were loose, hardware was missing, the fence had been bent and mangled in several locations, etc.). 

On Saturday morning Darlene Sexton, Jeffrey Barrow, and I went to Home Depot to buy the necessary hardware to fix the fences. We returned to the park shortly after 12:00 (we also picked up one of Darlene's friends and stopped for lunch). For the remainder of the afternoon the above group, along with Nancy Gneier and Gordon Bachlund, worked on the fences. We removed the gates and their hardware, and then reattached them with sturdier bolts, instead of screws. Once the gates were repaired, (all 8 of them) the fences were touched up with black paint in many places, including one area where the fence was (and still is, we didn't fix it last week) very badly bent out of shape.  Many thanks to everyone who helped with this boring, yet necessary project!

Daniel Price

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Copyright (c)1999. The Southern California Scenic Railway Association Inc.