Signal Crew Work

Today we got started about 9AM. Jack, Rich and I started by surveying the one-inch line. The weather was warm and humid with rain showers forcast. We got Doug Ebert's Rock Island Line locomotives working as well as we could. Still a problem with the second "A" unit of the F7s. It would not respond to the controller at all. We finally took the locos out with that A unit running dead. Our work train started up the track to Summit and we began marking bad bond wire connections. It started up raining off and on then finally lightning and thunder so we gave up at Summit and after covering the train with a tarp, walked down to the Lawson building. Someone started a fire in the potbelly stove and we all appreciated the heat. The rain drowned out the sound of our talking from time to time but we just piped up a little louder to compensate.

Saturday was a scheduled President's Lunch so Jack Anderson was cooking away in the kitchen building and we got a preview of the club's season menu. Swiss and mushrooms on a burger, cheese burgers, hamburgers and Coney Islands (Chili dogs). We all had our fill and we felt the quality of food was really good.

After lunch, the signal crew got back out to the track at Summit and started our descent. We started to find a ton of broken or missing bond wires. there were about eight on the second curved tressel and 26 on the third curved tressel! Several more bad locations on the ballasted track were found as well.

Although repairing bond wires on a tressel is really a bummer because it can only be done readily when trains are not running, repairing tunnel bond wires is the worst job.

One inch track is harder to work on as the #6 screws do not have a lot of strength and the heads twist off half the time as they are going in so it makes the job harder. The amount of space on the web of the rail (the vertical part) is limited so the hold for the bonding wire screw has to be fairly precise as the heads of the screws are close to the size of the web on  the one-inch rail.