On Saturday 2/20, Dwight Maxey, Colin Mellin, Kendall Crouch, Justin Cesar, David Hunter and Paul Brown came out to the Museum to finish up a project. And we did! The crew spent the morning installing the receptacle housing and cover on Engine 102 (our “Patriot” engine). Colin and Kendall got the battery cables soldered to the connectors while Justin and Paul bolted the receptacle housing together. After the solder work was done, Kendall pulled the cables back into the j-box under the cab. We took a quick lunch break and then returned to connect the cables to the batteries. Colin brought his crimper in to connect the lugs to the cable ends, and then Kendall and Paul cleaned the connection areas and made the final hook up. We did a quick test with the battery charger to make sure things will work.

This effort today finishes a larger project on all three of our GP-7 locomotives that allows us to charge the unit batteries with a simple ground level hook up. Our new battery charger can handle the load to keep our batteries healthy.

Now we can move on to our project to mount and animate a couple of signals that are laying around in the shop yard!

Below are a few pictures to illustrate the work done today.

– Paul