Saturday, April 25, 2009

The Caboose…. Or how the summer of love met railroad preservation

- Warning - Railroad content follows...

So my current side project is rebuilding a wooden narrow gauge caboose… a railroad car… small as cabooses go at only 26,500 lbs…

The car was set aside in 1932… railroad accountant speak for removing all the metal parts that can be sold as scrap, then selling the body for use as shed or house.

Our car body kicked around west Marin county ending up in Samuel P Taylor State Park… where it sat, rotted until the roof came near to collapse…

About 1968 the state parks gave the car to the “Pacific Coast Chapter of the Railway Locomotive Historical Society” an enthusiast group, trying to build a railroad museum near Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. They sent the car to the Bethlehem Ship Yard in San Francisco for restoration.

San Francisco in 1970 was something of a impromptu social experiment. The most obvious evidence was the so called Summer of Love, Free love, readily available drugs, incredible music, and dancing in Golden Gate Park. But there was much more. An intellectual and philosophical movement. Ferengetti and Kerouac and the beats. Archie Green and the glorification of labor and the labor movement.

Against this background a shipyard, staffed by union members, a mix of old craftsmen, and at least some of which are young men there in a quest for truth through traditional work, are asked to restore a then 80 year old railroad car. The work on this is early in the history of restoration… there wasn’t much in the way of guiding ideas.

The shipyard workers did well where ever they had something original to copy… So, the roof system was well copied… the platform framing was faithful to the original received… then, in the absence of historic examples or facts they just started making stuff up. The car had long lost its mechanical systems… trucks, couplers and brakes. Parts were located, at the shops of an abandon logging railroad.

Of course those parts didn’t always fit or match what the car had once had… So the shipyard workers got creative, and not in a good way… The couplers didn’t match the draft gear, so the couplers were “fixed” or rather butchered in a way that allowed them to be mounted to the carbody, but they were cosmetic, and would allow the car to be pulled, or worst pushed.

The brakes are best described as a work of fiction rather than friction. Good fiction, but still fiction. We had spent several days working on the car, setting hand brakes to keep it in place before we discovered that they were not connected, and that the parts that were present were so “wrong” that they needed to be removed and replaced entirely. Traditional railroad car brakes are a series of levers and rods. With one exception the rods pull as the brakes are applies. This car was set up by someone who assumed the rods pushed.

While laying under the car studying the brake problem we discovered that the car was missing a set of iron truss rods which support the wooden car body… then we started looking more closely and discovered that the current set installed by the ship yard are way too small. Early on we had realized they didn’t install the platform tension rods, so those were added to the work list.

The shipyard liked plywood… a material previously not found in this car… they replaced the tongue and groove (T&G) siding and flooring with sheets of plywood. The interior arraignment makes no sense... But it had all the stuff the railfans thought is should have, bench seats that could be used as bunks in an emergency, a big wood burning stove and a conductor's seat.

The paint and lettering was especially showy, with no historic precedent. The interior is painted a color called "seafoam" green, commonly used on Southern Pacific cabooses but adopted 10 years after this car was scrapped. The exterior is a peachy yellow, which is close to one of the colors used on the car, but it is set off with a large 4' in diamiter "redwood tree" herald, used on the companies stationary, but never on the cars... but it looked good to the railfans directing the work.

The resulting car looked good from 30’ away. It would roll (something it hadn’t been able to do since 1932) But it wasn’t functional as a railroad car and much of it was a work of fiction. I have to assume the readily available drugs were had some affect on the car we received... Its the best explanation I can think of...

Now we are making it functional… We have researched the car's history and written a pre-restoration plan to guide the work. We have pulled the decking off the end platforms, removed the couplers and found a way to remake the couplers so they will work. One of our boxcars has the same coupler miss-match, which the railroad solved about 1913, so we have a known railroad developed system to copy. We have a blacksmith at the park who can do the heavy bending… I found draft gear springs in our spare parts supply.

The steel for the new platform tension rods should arrive on Wednesday (along with the steel for the couplers.) The bolts holding the platforms to the car body are loose… and generally don’t have washers… and the bolts heads are trapped under the floor so we have to tear out the plywood floor to get at the heads… That will allow us to replace the plywood with correct T&G, which luckily we have on hand for a boxcar project.

In the meanwhile we will be rebuilding the cupola… which had a close encounter with a low bridge while the car was being transported from Sacramento. We have rebuilt the cupola already (that was last Labor Day weekend) but still need to install the new windows and cover the roof with the canvas painted with linseed oil paint (both the large pieces of heavy canvas and paint are hard to locate, but have been found)

I think I can make brakes out of spare parts on hand, so those will be cheap. With a bit of luck the car will be complete and operable by our railroad fair in September…

It’s a weird hobby as some of our visitors have noted in the past, but I enjoy it.

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