Just A Car Guy: 7/26/20

Saturday, August 01, 2020

race cars and parachutes, there aren't many things cooler

humor, the world could use so much more of it

I'm beginning to come around to liking the way a 1970 Coronet looks, I never liked it

I think they would have really benefited from hideaway headlights

https://www.facebook.com/MoparStammtischKoeln/photos/a.609635879101335/330024383337384

from 1948

https://www.facebook.com/groups/226675368608297/permalink/297614938181006/

even the remains of junked cars can still be very cool yard art (not that other kind, the "I'm going to fix it up some day" kind bullshit)

http://quirkyberkeley.com/car-art/

A caboose in the shipyard

used as an office for a fishing company in Oakland
https://www.abandonedrails.com/oakland-california

The coolest office in San Jose is a 1916 Pullman built, steel strapped wood box car, converted in Oct '43 to serve as a caboose for the San Francisco freight trains. Two bay windows replaced the original side freight doors.

After serving in the Sacramento area on fruit trains of the Sacramento Northern line, WP668 was retired, then acquired by the Golden Gate Railroad Museum.

The museum lost a lease for the area they were to display it at, and placed an ad in the newspaper, and sold it to to John Plocher and Katy Dickinson who moved it by truck from San Francisco to storage in San Jose, and then they rebuilt the roof and installed ceiling lights. They also removed their backyard swimming pool and installed a very short rail line in the same location.

In May 2007, it was moved onto the very short rail line in the Dickinson-Plocher backyard. The exterior was stripped and painted. Both decks and the bay window were rebuilt.

After installation into the back yard, the inside was painted, floor was rebuilt, electrical and network wiring were completed, stained glass was designed and installed, cactus garden and arroyito were designed and created, historical markings and WP herald were added, ladders and stair handrails were designed and created.

Then a fainting couch was restored and installed, the bay window seat designed and installed, stair handrails coated and finished, stair lighting installed.

Then a window seat cushion was designed and created, and a new office rug purchased in Marrakech, and a stove was installed

https://wp668.wordpress.com/
https://katysblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/redesigned-wp668-web-site/
https://katysblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/story-of-wp-caboose-668-4-may-2017.pdf
https://www.flickr.com/photos/plocher/with/11312592125/

another terrific restoration of a watch (where as other auto enthusiast sites just hype the watches, and tell you how much they cost)

Wouldn't it be cool to have a caboose in the back yard? I wonder how much more in demand the house would be on the real estate market when It came time to sell?

Rob Garross moved from his home in Waukegan, Illinois, to Berkeley in 1980. He bought his house on Fifth Street in 1996.

Walking his neighborhood, Garross was inspired by an old wooden caboose on a nearby railroad siding. In the 1980s, advances in railroad technology such as flashing rear-end devices, and end-of-train devices, intersected with corporate goals of reducing labor costs to spell the end of the caboose. They were sitting around, there for the buying.

When he was 25, Garross rode a caboose from Great Falls, Montana, to Everett, Washington. As was fitting for a young man of his generation, he had been inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

In 1998, he decided to buy a caboose to put in his driveway, but there was no internet for caboose shopping, so he visited railroad yards, first in Barstow and then in Sacramento, where he found and bought a late-model Southern Pacific bay window caboose.

He laid railroad track down the middle of his driveway and had the caboose trucked to Berkeley from Sacramento, then had a crane lift the caboose off the truck and into place

http://quirkyberkeley.com/trains/
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/09/14/how-quirky-is-berkeley-a-caboose-on-fifth-street

For the flip side, over at https://www.thecrucible.org/caboose/ they found a 1941 caboose in a backyard that they could have for free if they would remove it, fix it up, and use it as an office

Friday, July 31, 2020

Fitzpatrick illustrated the vehicles while Kaufman painted the backgrounds.

From 1959 to 1971 Van Kaufman (VK) and Art Fitzpatrick (AF) worked as a collaborative partnership, illustrating exclusively for Pontiac Motors. Fitzpatrick had previously been employed as an automotive designer while Kaufman had worked in the Disney Studio as an animator and background artist.