What are your proven methods for making antique passenger equipment (both operable or stationary) water-tight? It seems H2O is the biggest enemy of anything railroad that sits outside. Perhaps the information and ideas shared herewith can help volunteer organizations on a shoestring budget keep their rolling stock safe and secure from the elements. Of course, this would apply to anything sitting outside that has no chance of going under a shelter or into a building anytime soon.

Also, has anybody attempted interior humidity and temperature control for a standing piece of equipment sitting outdoors? What are your experiences, or better said, what worked and what didn't?

-K.R. Bell

Wow, what a question! No simple answer but there is one overall fundamental that applies. Stop the water on the most exterior surface possible. The simplest method is paint early and often. More sophisticated methods could increase painting cycle time.

With steel you have the added misery of condensation within the structure due to warmer air condensing on cooler exterior steel. You can either control the interior air so it will not condense or control where the vapor barrier layer is and what you do with the condensed water.

From here it gets pretty long-winded.

I want to say build a building... get them under cover... anything else is an ongoing fight with nature...

In the absence of a building... tarping in winter is ugly... but to some extent works.

In any case, address how water enters... the worst is side/baggage doors... then windows... then clearstory windows... then the roof... if the car is not well and regularly painted all is lost...

But, if possible, start with a building...

Randy

Water also rises.......like the sun. Rising water gets trapped under tarps and condenses in the least convenient and most destructive places where two structural elements come together and create corners in which it can congregate. So, the ground on which it sits also needs to shed water just as the covering needs to shed water. If you like in the desert your mileage may vary.

dave

This has killed a LOT of collectible automobiles. They get parked in the yard (or sometimes even driveway), tarped, and forgotten about. Then, surprise surprise, a year or few later the car is completely rusted out – the Houston area humidity is killer!
The only true way to preserve these is to put them under cover, unless it's out in the desert somewhere.

CD

Downunder we have been using EmerClad with very good results.

http://www.wpw.com.au/products/Parchem/parchem.htm

We've been able to find a colour match that's almost the same as the original Victorian Railways roof colour and on the first van we applied it to, it is still water tight/sealed after spending 6 years outside in a high railfall enviroment in winter and over 42-44'C temps in summer.....

About 50% of the way down this thread is what the applied product looks like.
http://www.railpage.com.au/f-t11326362-0-asc-s1200.htm
2 layers of 'paint' with a fiberglass mesh inlay between then. It's a rubberised paint so resists cracking as the body/roof of the vehicle moves.
Cheers, Alistair.

Orange Empire at Perris, California, is close to the desert. But not quite there.

In the formative years the construction of covered storage was thought unnecessary because there was no snow problem or extensive rains as in the east. But this was wrong! The heat, the UV of the sun, etc. dried out the wood, faded the paint, etc.

Under cover is the best. No matter the environment.

Any roofing material you use, you have to think forward to what happens when that material fails.

For instance every lumberyard sells five gallon pails of silver or black tar you can put on a roof. It'll seal the roof for a season or three, the first two or three times you use it. But then the layers will shrink and delaminate from each other and the roof, leaving a rough landscape of buried water passages. You can't seal it. You can't get it off to start over. You've painted yourself into a corner.

The Emerclad has a 25 year guarantee against cracking/delaminating when correctly applied, so not somethat that needs redoing every few seasons.
Admittidly we've only be using it for 6 years but that first roof we did still looks as good today as it did when it first rolled out of the shop.
We've even 'convertered' a few other preservation groups locally to use it too.

Under cover is of course the best method. The Pichi Richi Railway in South Australia has sheds that are large enough to keep all of their passenger rolling stock and locomotives inside, including the unrestored ones.
This was achieved thru a method of everytime they needed to fund raise money to purchase or move a donated item of rolling stock, the cost of extending/building shed space to stored it in was included in that fund raising.
And this isn't a small collection. At a rough guess it would be around 35-40 passenger cars and about 10 locomotives all undercover......

Cheers, Alistair.

Tar raises as interesting preservation problem. Many of the cars at the Western Railroad Museum are from railroads that made copious use of tar on most any available surface - sometimes as a paint and sometimes as a roof coating. If we were to be historically accurate in our preservation work, we would use tar. But, as noted above, tar doesn't protect from water damage, indeed it facilitates it. So, we remove the tar (and often replace the underlying rotted wood) and paint with black AwlGrip. It's a compromise with historical accuracy that is necessary if we are to assure long-term preservation, and perhaps no more of a compromise then our other uses of modern paints.

I've used elastomeric roof products on seamed terne roofs with varying results, and to make repairs to canvas roofs with good results. In both cases, the original roofs were not made to live outdoors for decades with nothing done to maintain them, nor were they expected to live as long as they did.

dave

The Railroad Museum of New England has had luck EPDM roofing on two cars (CV caboose 4014 and CN coach 5114) with a third due for the same treatment. No issues yet.

I think the first stop on watertightness is impeccable care of roofs. I see that at very few heritage railways, because the fact is, roofs are devilishly difficult to access. Many don't even own a proper set of scaffolding.

And Joe, as far as Awlgrip, it is a superior paint, but does not have the properties of a dedicated roof membrane like canvas-and-oil or EPDM rubber. It'd be a superior paint on a roof surface already watertight which needs paint (e.g. metal). In that case it's the first thing I reach for, because it has truly exceptional resistance to being struck by tree branches and the like (when allowed a full 28 day cure).

Roofs are so important that I'm OK with compromising history a bit.