| Greetings! Still much snow on the ground but a day where temps got up into the upper 30's, so some slush around. Showed up in the Shop at about 9:30 and the boys were already hard at work on the new open flat car, MKT # 13833. Went back into the West Annex and found Cory Bennett, John LaOrange and Dave Cook continuing their work on the backhoe. Meanwhile, Fred Boyer was continuing his work on the windows of LIRR coach # 2937. So, I wandered back into the main Shop and watched the work going on on the flat car. Doug Kosloske was cutting the tops off of the tall side support posts. I joined in and soon found myself as part of the team putting the three horizontal side rails onto the posts. Elmer Mannen drilled pilot holes for each side rail through the posts, then Bob Jachim, up on the car deck, drilled through the holes, making them large enough for bolts to go through. I grabbed a different drill from Elmer, and started counter sinking larger holes from the outside of the car, one for each of the three side rails into each post so that the long bolts wouldn't stick out from the side of the car. After I was done, Bill Dauber, also on the car deck, pounded a long bolt through each of the three previously drilled holes. Then Bob Albert came along and applied a washer and nut to each bolt into the counter sunk holes and finally, John DeGan, tightened each nut. This "assembly line" of Elmer-Bob-myself-Bill-Bob-John, moved along quickly finishing one side of the car and then moving over to the other side. Henry Ford's Assembly Line had nothing on us! We managed to finish the job by lunch. Others working on the flat included Joe Baker and Joe Kingsbury. Randall Downs also spelled me for a while on the "assembly line". We broke for lunch, which consisted of hot chicken/barley soup, cheeseburgers, lasagna, and assorted other goodies. After lunch, John DeGan went over to do some welding for the boys working on the back hoe. I visited with Fred Boyer who needed some help removing a short piece of rubber molding from one of the windows he was working on. Fred reported that he was down to near the end of his third, and last, wire wheel and wasn't sure if he was going to be able to finish cleaning the paint from the windows on the south side of LIRR 2937. Meanwhile, the boys working on MKT 13833 started putting the roof struts up on the one end of the car. Joe had cut these struts at home during the week, angling then so that they had a slight peak so that the car would not have a flat roof. Bob Jachim made a run to Norwayne Lumber for some additional long two by sixes, which were going to be needed for the other end of the car. Bob cleaned the snow and ice off of these 2 x 6's, and I carried them in and set them up on some wood struts so that they can hopefully dry out a bit so that the Wednesday crew will be able to use them. In the meantime, about 5 roof struts had been put up on the other end of the car before we ended up calling it a day in the Shop. Other members at the museum today included Bob Barcus, Andy Roeske, Loretta Kosloske, Margrett Cook, Mark Knebel, Tom Travis, Chuck Ness, Tom Royce and Jason Annen. Might have missed a few. Sorry if I did. Went over to the depot where some of us sat around and kibitzed for a while. I noticed that Bob Albert had put up some new photos in the depot waiting area, these of Indiana Harbor Belt steam locomotives. They look good. HVRM's new website is apparently getting close to going on line. Looking forward to that. Steve Newland was doing some work on the G scale layout in the gift shop area of the depot. Getting closer to operation all the time. We may be getting a major storm toward the middle of this coming week. At least, that's what the weather folks tell us. We shall see. In the meantime, we are nearly into February, which is a short month, so winter will eventually be ending. In the meantime, hang in there, and have a great week. Les | 
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