After nearly 6 months of waiting for our newly-acquired diner from Amtrak, it finally showed up in our hometown.

Long story behind it of CSX humping it, damaging each end of it, jury-rigging repairs, bad-ordering it, more jury rigging, more bad orders, more half-assed work, and then dropping it off to NS with nary a word and having it rejected back, etc, and finally having political connections get involved...

Anyway, we are discussing ways to use the car including leaving it alone as a Heritage diner, or restoring her to some semblance of her CB&Q heritage. If we were to do that, any suggestions for removing the massive Amtrak logo that stretches along the window line from end to end?

Thanks in advance for any constructive advice.

Matt Bumgarner
Alexander Chapter NRHS
SE Narrow Gauge & Shortline Museum

Not that I will be helpful in advice but may I ask - is the car one of the refurbished diners that had the green seats and the “starlight” ceiling? Or the bare minnimum heritage car?

And what do you wish to do with the car? Dinner train? Display? Stationary snack bar?

"Long story behind it of CSX humping it, damaging each end of it,"

What, again, I swear the CSX crews take those "do not hump" signs as a challenge...

Somebody should start a roll-call of all the equipment destined for museums that CSX ran through one of their hump yards just for the fun of it....

In fairness, none of this historic stuff was designed to be "humped" through a modern freight yard.... But it still happens...

Regarding the paint, simply dunk the whole car (vestibule end first) into a big deep tank of organic paint remover.... Rinse and repeat.... Just kidding.

You have the usual options discussed here many times over; sandblast (noisy and messy), dry ice blast (noisy but less messy), wire wheels on grinders (slow), flap discs on grinder (slow but less damaging), manually apply paint remover and scrape (very slow and exposes folks to "nasty" chemicals)...

There is a new option, get one of the Laser Guns that use very high intensity light to burn off anything that is not bare metal, just open your wallet and pull out $10,000.

"Depainting" this stuff might just be harder than painting it...

Good luck, Kevin.

If I recall, those are vinyl appliqués. If so, a heat gun and a stiff plastic scraper will usually get it off. Don’t burn the decal, just soften the adhesive enough to scrape off the decal. Any left over sticky stuff can usually be removed with something like Goo Gone or acetone. If that doesn’t work, soda blasting could work and won’t damage stainless steel. It’s not a fast process. I’m sure others here have done this recently and will have more or better advice.

Did the CB&Q run through Alexander County on a narrow gauge or shortline? Having trouble figuring out why you'd want it in the first place. You guys are second to none when it comes to wooden car reconstruction from a couple splinters and a rusty nail, but this....... where does it fit in?

I have taken those off many times. You simply use a heat gun. Start at one end and heat the end of the vinyl until it starts to deform or bubble. Then you simply pull it off the metal. Once you get a few inches up, keep tension on the vinyl and heat it up. Usually it goes pretty quickly. Do not overheat or burn the vinyl as it will start to crack and crumble making it difficult to remove. Every now and then I would get a really hard logo that felt like it was glued on. In that case once I got the end up I would push a paint scraper under the logo to break the bond. You really need two people for that type of job. In either case you will likely have some residue left over. You can use paint thinner, brake parts cleaner, or solvent to get that off. Test a small area to make sure it will not effect the paint. Here is a video of a guy doing it on a car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I0_9Pqa8Tg

Damaging privately-owned passenger cars in humping or switching accidents goes back a long way. It's been long enough ago that I think I can relate this story, and if Misterwandle thinks I shouldn't he'll tell me, but I don't think there's anything negative towards anyone except Conrail here.

In 1979, Jerry Jacobson was in the middle of restoring 0-6-0 Jackson Iron & Steel #3, what was, and is now again Baldwin Locomotive Works #26, at the JISCO mill in Jackson, Ohio. He was looking for his first passenger car to pull with it. (What became the Ohio Central System started out as his search for a place to run #3 as a simple excursion operation). Anyway, I had started occasionally helping work on #3 when I could, my senior year of college. I also lived only a few miles from Jerry. He found a clean heavyweight coach, that had at one time belonged to the Algoma Central, on the Boyne City Railroad in Boyne City, Michigan. He was going to make a marathon 24 hour round-trip from Akron, Ohio to Boyne City to make a deal for the car, inspect it and get it ready for interchange to Ohio. He asked me to ride along for company, and to keep him awake. It's about a 950 mile round trip, and we did it from around 4 am on a Saturday morning to 4 am Sunday morning in November 1979, starting and ending with breakfast at his favorite Akron restaurant, Jack Horner's. (When the restaurant finally closed for good in the late 1980's, Jerry made sure he was the last customer, and kept the menu.)

Anyway, we made the trip, he paid for the car, we went to the railroad, looked it over, and he removed the steam heat fittings from the ends of the car and took them home in the trunk for safe keeping. Somewhere I've got a slides of the coach that day, both exterior and interior. He and the Boyne City Railroad arranged for it to be interchanged out on Conrail.

So, a couple of weeks later I talked to Jerry on the phone and he tells me that he spent that time trying to track down what happened to the car, calling Conrail yard offices all over the region. He finally tracked it down to Elkart, IN. When he got the second trick Yard Master on the phone and told him what he was looking for the YM said, "Oh, yeah, it's here, and she's sick". "What do you mean she's sick?", Jerry asked. And then Jerry got a sick feeling. Turns out some genius yard crew kicked six carloads of coiled steel into it, bowing the frame, and crushing one of the vestibules. So much for the beginning of a Jerry Jacobson tourist railroad before 1981. He ended up selling the car to Bill Fuhring at Mad River & NKP Museum in Bellevue, where it sat on a siding across from the museum for years as a parts car. Others here may have photos of it there.

Matt,
I am a narrow gauge fan who is impressed with your many preservation projects. And I am going to second the request from up above. What in the world do you want with a C,B & Q diner? It is the wrong gauge from the wrong part of the country!

Ted Miles, CRRM Member among others

When the trains at work get tagged part of the clean off involves pressure washing and that removes the graphics if they are not careful. As mentioned, heat guns are the least damaging way.

There's some corollary of Murphy's Law that dictates that this only works when you don't WANT it to, and vice versa.

"Where DOES a CB&Q diner fit in the collection of the SE Narrow Gauge & Shortline Museum?" seems to be a popular question...

The short answer is:

a) In the revenue/money making department, first and foremost. Our plan is to turn it into a stationary, functioning specialty restaurant. We think this will work because 1) it has been requested by patrons of the museum (wouldn't it be neat if you had a dining car to serve meals) 2) While us die-hards are very proud of the narrow gauge collection we have amassed, and have used it to put our dot on the map, 99% of visitors and donors don't really care. 3) It is unique enough that it should be an attraction to both the general public and railfans. We are the only museum in either Carolinas with a functioning diner car. 4) It was essentially donated to us. I paid $250 dollars for it, and by the time I friggin' get CSX back-billed for the damage they caused, they are gonna owe ME money less the tariff to get it here. Even without the damage, the project was low-risk.

And believe it or not, there is a kinda-sorta connection between the Q and ourselves. Our museum sits smack on the middle of what was the Carolina & North-Western Railway, once the longest narrow gauge in either NC or SC and it stretched between Chester, SC, and Lenoir, NC. For more than a decade, the company kept up the public line that it was going to expand over the mountains and into TN & KY, and eventually, the local press was sick of the empty proclamations.

One day, it was reported in the local rag that a conversation was overheard in the Lenoir yard between a pair of "waggishly inclined" gentlemen. Upon spotting a boxcar for the Burlington, one asked what the initials C B and Q stood for... the other man quickly said "Chester, By-george, & Quit" and then he quickly added that our local C&N-W stood for "Can't and Never Will!" Thus, the nickname for our local C&N-W was born, and it endures to this day... now with this diner from the Q, we have a tangible connection.

Yeah, its a stretch, but it's a good laugh... hopefully all the way to the bank so that the revenue can support the other aspects of the museum that we have staked our name upon.

Matt Bumgarner
Alexander Chapter-NRHS
SE Narrow Gauge & Shortline Museum

PS-- I DID try to get one of the 5 Southern diners, but somebody paid some big $$ for those and I wound up with choice #6.

Cool! Please don't limit the business to only your visitors, but get locals accustomed to finding a good old style diner meal there every day for breakfast and lunch. Save evenings for special events..... I think if you have a functioning railroad galley you might get Vivian Howard to do a show there recreating Pullman recipes on PBS and widen your sphere of influence a bit.

I forget off hand exactly which ex-Q diner you guys got, but the fact is there's very, very little left in most of these Amtrak Heritage diners from the as-built condition. The original kitchens were gutted when they were first made into Heritage diners circa 1979/1980. The dining rooms all had booths replace the original tables and loose GF chairs. In many cases, after 10-15 years or so, even all the original light fixtures were replaced. Most, if not all window sash has been changed to "Emergency Exit" sash. Of course, all the Q skirts were gone during the 1979/1980 rebuilding. The point is there is usually very little resemblance to the original cars at this point. So, "restoring" it to some sort of Q appearance really doesn't make much sense.

So, why not be different and restore the thing as-is. Make it look like a freshly overhauled Amtrak diner, just out of Beech Grove shops. That is what I plan to do with the diner I got at the Auction. After over 50 years, I think at least some ex-Amtrak cars deserve to be restored as Amtrak cars.

That’s what I had been thinking when I asked which type of interior diner they received. The rebuilt cars with the green interiors are really nice. I would think keeping them “as is” would be the smartest move.

If it’s one of the more “bare” heritage diners I think it would be best to go for a more historically correct look. Many examples of equipment and facilities being gutted and rebuilt.

The diner we got was 8504, originally the "Silver Restaurant."

Interior-wise we will probably leave it alone...

Leaving the exterior as an Amtrak car is still an option at this time... certainly short term.

Nothing is off the table at this point.

Thanks

Matt