| Hello! Had two days of relatively light snowfall at the end of this week, a reminder that Old Man Winter ain't quite done with us yet. Dismal day today with temp up to 34 degrees and a bit of light snow in the afternoon. Quiet day at the museum. Mike Koehler and Carl Grill spent the week working on Long Island coach 2937. They had painted silver on the metal framing around the windows but the paint wouldn't dry and was runny. Mike apparently called the manufacturer and was told, yes, that's what you get. So, they had to scrape off that paint and get new silver paint and apply it. A real setback to their work this week! But this afternoon, Mike and Carl spray painted and the bright news is that the east end and the north side of LIRR 2937 look good in their new coat of Charcoal Gray. Still have to do the south side, the west end and the roof (which will be Brunswick Green). Mike has also applied the red end marker lenses to the car. Joe Baker was finishing up the electrical lights on MKT 13833, the open air flatcar. Looks really good! John DeGan worked cleaning the depot, including washing down the floors in both of the washrooms. Meanwhile, Pat DeGan moved merchandise enabling
Bob Barcus to tear down the smaller clothes rack. This greatly opens up the area in the gift shop in front of the counter. The wood stove in the Old Shop had not been started, so I cleaned out ashes and eventually got one of the wood matches to light and started the fire. The problem with that stove is that it just doesn't give off much heat to that portion of the Shop. It's more a case of workers getting cold and then coming over for a few minutes to stand by the stove and warm up a little bit. After I finally got the stove going with a couple of the now nearly depleted pieces of cut wood in our indoor wood pile, I started sweeping up sawdust around the woodshop area. While doing that, Chuck Ness showed up and during our conversation, he informed me that the Old Shop had originally been put up by a predecessor of McGill Manufacturing as a foundry building back in 1917. I knew the building was old, but did not realize that it was that old! Lunch from Keller's Diner today consisited of soup, hot turkey in gravy, sausage and noodles in a tomato sauce, various sandwich varieties with spice cake and/or a cantaloupe/pineapple/grape salad, for desert. After lunch, I journied back to the Shop, stoked the fire with the last of the cut wood pile and then went out and got 3 armfulls of wood from under the snow cover. By next week, those pieces should hopefully be dry enough to use in the stove. Work continues to go forward on preparations for the coming passenger season, including the visit of NKP 2-8-4 # 765. Loretta Kosloske showed Tom Travis and I, the new tickets for the upcoming year. The back of each ticket contains advertising for three restaurants in town; the Wooden Nickel, Keller's and the Brantwood. Receipts from the sale of this advertising space, helped offset the cost of the ticket printing. Steve Newland packed items away up in our storage "attic" in the depot, and found a blue and white sign which Bob Barcus was most happy to take charge of, as it is from the old Pennsy Plymouth depot. Doug Kosloske was working on the blue card covering EL 310. Good to see Ted Fitzgerald, a long time member who is very active down at Whitewater Valley these days. When I finally left at about quarter to 5, Mark Knebel was still waiting for Randall Downs to get back with some items for him. Randall and Fred Boyer had worked the train show in Muncie today. Enjoy your week everyone! Les | 
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