Whenever people see my collection of New Haven Railroad artifacts for the first time they always ask me where I get this stuff. My standard answer is that it comes from anywhere and everywhere. Some people think that I'm being evasive when I give this answer but it's the truth. There is no one single source for the things that I collect. They literally come from anywhere and everywhere imaginable - flea markets, yard sales, antique shops, auctions, estate sales, former railroad employees, other collectors - you name it.
Sometimes New Haven Railroad things come to me from totally unexpected sources. Take this recent acquisition, for example:
In July 2004 I was driving on Route 44 just outside of Putnam on my way to the University of Connecticut in Storrs when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something vaguely familiar peeking out of the dense undergrowth surrounding a derelict highway trailer parked on the side of a small automobile repair shop. I turned my truck around and pulled off the road to take a closer look. Sure enough, what had caught my attention was an old New Haven piggyback trailer, one of thirty units supplied to the railroad by Fruehauf in 1957.
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Here's the old New Haven Railroad piggyback trailer as it appeared when I found it. I'm still not quite sure what it was that caught my attention. According to the owner, the trailer has been sitting here in plain view of Route 44, a fairly busy road in Connecticut, for over twenty years. I can't imagine that I'm the first to recognize it but apparently that's the case. |
Upon close inspection it became immediately obvious that the trailer was a complete write-off. These particular trailers were unique on the New Haven in that they were constructed entirely of Cor-Ten steel, instead of non-corrosive aluminum, as was the case with all other piggyback trailers on the railroad. The steel box had rusted so badly over the years that it had actually broken loose from the frame and collapsed down around the floor to rest on the ground.
The trailer had originally been painted red-orange while in New Haven Railroad service. However, a later owner (not the automobile repair shop) had subsequently repainted the trailer olive-green. The olive-green paint was badly oxidized, revealing the original New Haven red-orange in many places. Each side of the trailer had been decorated with a large painted-on NH logo, the "shadow" of which could still be seen under the olive-green paint. Better still, from my perspective, each side was also fitted with two galvanized sheet-metal sign boards, one lettered "New Haven Railroad" and the other "Trailiner Service" in white paint on a red-orange background. Though in poor condition, the old New Haven sign boards were still secured to both sides of the trailer.
I was pretty excited as I had always wanted a set of these sign boards for my collection. Once I had regained my composure, I walked over to the automobile repair shop and asked to speak to the owner. I introduced myself and identified myself as a railroad historian. I told the owner that he had an old piggyback trailer from the New Haven Railroad on his property and offered to give him $100 in cash if he'd permit me to return at a later date with tools to remove the four sign boards off the side of the trailer. The owner said, "You mean that rusted out trailer over there in the weeds? You must be crazy." I assured him that I was serious and reiterated my offer to give him $100 to let me remove the sign boards. He then insisted that I take him over to the trailer to show him what I wanted. I pointed out the ghostly image of the NH logo and showed him the badly faded railroad lettering on the sign boards on the side of the trailer facing the road. He told me that he had never noticed them before and said that if I really wanted them I could take them anytime I wanted to.
I returned the following Saturday with a friend, a ladder, and a wide array of tools including a hammer, chisel, pry bar, assortment of screwdrivers, and an electric drill. It was a rainy and miserable Saturday, just like the day I found the trailer in fact. My first stop was to re-introduce myself to the owner again and present him with a crisp new $100 bill. He thanked me and reiterated his believe that I was crazy. He told me to be careful working around the trailer and wished me luck.
After surveying the site for a second time, I came to the conclusion that the sign boards were a total write-off. For one thing, the sign boards closest to the road were in extremely poor condition, the paint being almost completely worn away and the metal itself being rusted, dented, and in some areas torn from what appeared to have been a side-swiping incident. My friend, however, insisted that if we had come all this way (more than two hours drive) we might as well take what we could get. He also suggested that the sign boards on the other side of the trailer were probably in better condition.
It turned out that my friend was right. The sign boards on the other side of the trailer were in better condition, relatively speaking, but because of the dense foliage they were nearly inaccessible. We had to literally hack our way through the bushes and several willow trees that had grown up around the trailer like we were in the Amazon so I could get to the other side. There was no way to get the ladder through the small tunnel we made through the dense foliage so my friend climbed up to the roof of the trailer from the road-side, I passed the ladder up to him, and then he passed it back down the opposite side so that I could climb up and begin to remove the sign boards.
I had hoped that the sign boards would be screwed into the metal or secured with aluminum pop-rivets but this was not so. The sign boards were attached to the sides of the trailer with hard stainless steel rivets. Drilling these out with my low torque electric drill proved impossible. However, a determined attack with the hammer, chisel, and pry bar proved no match for the rivets and one by one they came out.
| Here's the Route 44 side of the trailer after we took the two sign boards off. If you look very closely you can see the NH logo. Under the sign boards was New Haven red-orange paint that had oxidized to a brownish color over the course of nearly 50 years time. |  |
It took nearly three hours of back-breaking labor - sometimes in driving rain and always while muddy and covered in rust - to take all four sign boards off the trailer. At this point, I was still very dismayed but for the sake of my friend, who had torn holes in his pants and give himself some nasty cuts in the process of helping me, I decided to put on an act and behave as if the day had been a great success.
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Here's my haul laid out for inspection - four worthless old pieces of rusty sheet metal. The topmost pair came from the side of the trailer not visible from the road. As my friend predicted, these two were actually in pretty decent condition, all things considered, with all of the New Haven lettering visible, though the paint was badly oxidized and faded. |
Once I returned home, I laid all four sign boards out flat on my front porch and tried to figure out how best to approach the job of restoration. Luckily, the two sign boards from the side of the trailer opposite the road were in pretty decent condition, all things considered. The lettering was still visible, though in deplorable condition, the rust was superficial, and the metal was fairly straight with most of the deformations actually coming from my increasingly frantic efforts to pry the sign boards off the side of the trailer. So, I decided to try to restore these two first, with restoration of the other two to follow as time and patience permits.
First off, I copied the outline of each letter using tracing paper. This was then transferred to thin cardstock, which was then cut-out to form a series of templates. Once I had a full set of lettering templates, I took careful measurements of each letter's position and spacing on the sign board for future reference.
The next step was to remove all traces of paint using paint stripper. This proved to be very simple to do. The old paint was so badly oxidized that no scrubbing was required. I merely applied the paint stripper, let it sit for a few minutes, and then sprayed the sign boards with a garden hose. The old paint came right off with no trouble.
After cleaning the paint stripper residue from the sign boards and drying them thoroughly, I straightened the metal out using two blocks of wood and a ball peen hammer. With this accomplished, I went after the rust spots with a wire wheel on an electric drill.
Having cleaned the rusty spots up as best as I could with the wire wheel, I painted what little rust remained with a rust-converter that turns rust into an inert substance that can be painted. This stuff is sold wherever auto body supplies are found. I used Rustoleum brand, which seems to work very well.
I cleaned both sign boards up and allowed the rust converter to do its stuff for two days, as recommended. Next came a coat of Plasticote automotive lacquer primer. This was followed an hour or so later by three coats of Plasticote automotive red-orange lacquer, which is an excellent match for the New Haven color.
After allowing the red-orange paint to dry overnight I covered the facing side of each sign board with wide masking tape. Then, using the cardboard templates, I laid out the lettering on each sign, "New Haven Railroad" on one and "Trailiner Service" on the other. Once this was accomplished, I cut the letters out of the masking tape using a #11 Exacto knife blade. I then gave each sign board two coats of Plasticote white automotive lacquer.
I let the white lacquer set up for about ten minutes, then removed the masking tape. I must confess that I was nearly shocked by the results. The old sign boards came out beautiful - as good as new.
| Who says you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? The two restored New Haven Railroad piggyback trailer sign boards were attached to 1" pine boards using red-orange painted round-head screws in the original rivet holes to keep the thin sheet metal from flexing and these were then mounted to an appropriate wall in my display area as seen here. |  |
This is an extreme example, to be sure, but this is the kind of thing I do in my never-ending quest to obtain artifacts for Marc Frattasio's New Haven Railroad Museum!