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Cleveland, Ohio.
Friday, Oct 25, 1940.
Spent most of the morning trying to clean up the B&M overweight difficulty. John Downie and I thought perhaps the best answer would be to try to get the B&M to let us substitute a light drop lever hand brake for the enormous Ajax wheel type now used - it has a chain alone big enough to anchor a battleship but was the type the B&M wanted. Not being very happy with the solution nor with other suggested such as cutting excess metal off the wheel treads or reducing the sand capacity, I went down into the shop where I ran into Sperchen and McCaleb. Suddenly an old idea I once had came back as I looked at the locomotive - leave off the skirts. The B&M once indicated they didn't favor them anyhow because they felt they interfered with accessibility - I suggested it to Spike, substituting aluminium doors, and he agreed. We can save 200 to 250 lb. and I finally got "A.J." to agree. He wanted me to suggest turning wheels in the hopes they would say "let it go" which I didn't favor because they might say "OK" and we'd be in for some heavy expense. I phoned Neil and made our proposal but up to my leaving at 1 30 PM, he had not wired an answer. This 44 ton weight business is loaded with dynamite because we are skating so close to the line anyhow and no one seems to know just how accurate our scales are - and if the locomotives weight 90,000 lb. on the railroad property loaded with everything the brotherhoods can scare up including a 250 lb. engineer, it means two men (a fireman) and the whole picture of financial return is upset. The B&M wants 89000 lb. here with only the engineer to be added over there - so the 1000 lb. has to take care of him and differences between our scales and theirs - none too much leeway.