This portion of the web pages covers details on the roof restoration of the Combine.
The Combine came to RMEO with a roof that was in bad shape, but fortunately had most of its stacks and air vents. If one looks at the pictures in the History of 7195 section one can see how the roof looked when the car was in service. Shorty after arrival at RMEO a number of volunteers rebuilt the roof. No one is sure of the exact date, but it was sometime around 1992 when I was not a volunteer at the museum. The pages “Roof – 1992” contain some pictures of the work they did. Once they had completed the project it was basically a brand new roof. In replacing the roof they did not replace the vents or smoke stacks. This was probably a good idea as it kept the car from having more holes in the roof. Once the new wood was down the roof was covered with a roofing paper and given a coat of tar sealer.
Roofs are the bane of our existence at RMEO. They never seems to last long, are always “coming apart”, and require constant maintenance in order to keep the structure under them dry. The roof paper used on the car roofs is especially difficult as the hot sun bakes the paper and makes it fragile. Then the winter cold and wind rip it off the roof, leaving us at square one. The only way to avoid this problem is to add a fresh coat of liquid tar sealer to the roof every year. If this is done, then the roof can last forever.
Unfortunately over the next decade the roof did not receive its yearly coating of tar sealant and it decayed to the point that by 2006 much of the roofing cover had disappeared. Volunteers again recovered large portions of the roof to stop the water from entering. Once again no real preventive maintenance was done except for some odd patching done here and there. The net result was that by the time I took over the car in 2012 all the paper on the west side had disappeared and some of the wood had started to rot. On the east side and the center portion of the roof there were numerous water leaks. Over the vestibule on the front right (north west corner) the curved wood had never been replaced, leaving a large hole in this area. When I took over the car in 2012 another volunteer and myself work many days to patch the roof and make things water tight.
The object of the 2012 repair was to make the car water tight, and not to make the roof like new. To this end new roofing paper was used where necessary and the wood portions were fixed only very basically. Almost all of the drip edges are either missing or rotted beyond use and will need to be replaced. None of this was done in this repair. The roof was repaired in such a manner that it should remain water tight for a very long time so long as a liquid roofing tar is applied once a year, usually in the fall. The pictures of this work can be seen in “Roof – 2012”
In the future the entire roof covering needs to come off and be replaced with a more durable membrane like rubber. At this point any weak areas of wood needs to be replaced along with all the drip edges. As well, the vertical rise in the clearstory needs to be replaced with steel, as it was originally. Before the installation of a new membrane, the vents and smoke stacks will also need to be reattached. Performing this work will not only provide an authentic look to the car, but also a more durable finish that will last longer in the hot summer and cold winters.