Getting close to turning the corner at HVRM 3-19-11

Greetings!   Well, a day in the 70's this past week, and a sunny day in the mid-50's today at North Judson, makes one think that perhaps we have turned the corner into Spring.  BUT, rain and colder temps are in the forecast for this coming week, so maybe not quite yet!   Meanwhile the nice temps found John LaOrange, Mark Knebel and Bob Jachim replacing a few old ties right in front of the North Judson depot building.  The location of the platform right next to the track prevented the newly acquired backhoe from being used, so it was doing things the old fashioned way with these ties; the old pull, push, sweat and pound method!  But the new ties did get put in!   Mike Koehler and Carl Grill, with an assist by Fred Boyer, finished the painting of LIRR coach # 2937.  The car is now wearing its Charcoal Gray body paint and Brunswick Green roof paint and looks sharp!  Mike still has to apply the Long Island lettering and various decals.  The car should be done this weekend.   Joe Baker and Bill Dauber helped Joe Kingsbury in installing grab irons on MKT 13833 this morning.  Louise Kingsbury had helped husband Joe during the week in giving the car a nice coat of bright red Katy paint and Joe K. used a newly cut stencil to start the outline of the reporting marks and number on the side of the car.   For lunch, there was soup, various sandwiches, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, sausage links and patties and bacon along with desert.   The business/membership meeting was held in the depot and a report will be coming in the newsletter.   I had started working on MDT 13385, one of our two steel, ice bunker, refrigerator car, in the morning.  These two cars had been held by Merchant Despatch Transportation for records storage at Chicago, after the company had gone to highway trailers on piggyback flat cars for moving perishable items.  Donated to the museum by MDT back in 1995, sister MDT car 14070 was cleaned up and restored back in 2002 by Tom Travis and yours truly, but nothing was ever done with MDT 13385.  Now we want to try to make it presentable.  One thing that MDT had done when the cars were used for storage in Chicago, was wire them with electricity, including installing thinwall on the outside of the car.  This is what I started to remove this morning, finishing most of the job by lunch.  After the meeting, I resumed work and got to the point where I had to remove the electrical work going into the inside of the car.  The lock on the door on the side I was working on would not open, apparently rusted shut!  Finally was able to get the opposite door opened, crawled over the boiler tubes stored on the inside of the car, and removed the offending electrical box.  MDT 13385 had its number "white lined", as the railroads used to do, so I started trying to sand that white (actually turned out to be yellow) paint from the side of the car where I was working.  Got most of it off.  Will still have to clean this entire car up.   Hope everyone has a good week.  Think Spring!   Les

FW: Old man winter continues to ignore calendar at HVRM 3-26-11

Hello!   Although we have had a couple of spring-like days since Spring officially arrived here in northwest Indiana, this past week was much more typical of winter.  Today at North Judson was a good example.  Although there was some sunshine, temps hovered in the 30's all day, briefly touching 40 before dropping back down again.  And a wicked north wind in the 20's and gusting into the 30's and coming straight down off of Lake Michigan, made the day feel like January instead of late March.  Still, work at Hoosier Valley went on.   John LaOrange, Dave Cook and Mark Knebel worked on track near the east switch of the runaround track.  This switch was in the very first piece of trackwork put on museum grounds when the museum crossed over Main Street back in 1988 or 1989.  The switch was built of various components and is thrown by an old Erie high stand switchthrow, the only one at the museum.   Rich and his friend Jeff, continued their work on the G scale layout that runs around the top part of the walls in the gift shop section of the depot.  A plastic barrier is being installed for safety of depot visitors.  Meanwhile, the UP passenger train, pulled by a A-B-A set of Alco PA's, looks and sounds wonderful!   Margrett Cook, Loretta Kosloske, Judy Boyer and Pat DeGan manned the gift shop today.   A train crew headed by Jason Annen and Andy Hershman, had the Alco out and pulled the string of freight cars over to the Shop area.  Andy, Mitch Montgomery and Kelly Lynch, with help from Jason, spent the day doing single car brake tests on each of our freight cars.  Some failed to pass, others did pass.  Those that failed will be worked on to bring them up to snuff.   Kyle Flanigan was at the museum today and told us that he had been granted a National Railway Historical Society award to attend their RAILCAMP this summer at Steamtown.  This is a great program for teenagers who are interested in railroads and rail presevation.  Kyle is very deserving of the honor.  HVRM is proud to have entered his name in for consideration by the Blackhawk Chapter of NRHS.  This is another great thing that Blackhawk has done for Hoosier Valley and railroad preservation.   Fred Boyer spent the day attaching platform hand rails and "Watch Your Step" signs to the end steps of Long Island passenger coach # 2937.  The LIRR coach looks great, with all of the lettering now on the car; LONG ISLAND spelled out in white on the cars letterboard, the car number centered on the car under the windows in red letters on a stainless steel type background, and the circled number 147 on each end of the car on both sides.  I am not quite sure what the 147 signifies, but Mike says it is authentic to this car.    Bill Dauber, Joe Kingsbury, Elmer Mannen and Doug Kosloske were working on the platform that is going to be installed so that folks can get from EJ&E # 184, our transfer caboose, over to the MKT # 13833, our new open air passenger carrying flat car.  Meanwhile, Joe has stencilled the outline for the car numbers and reporting marks and all of the car data, on the car and must now just fill in the stencils with white paint.   Bob Jachim had his drill out and was drilling holes in corrugated metal sheets for some project.  I forgot to ask Bob what the project was!  I will find out eventually.   I couldn't work on MDT 13385 since the crew was working on the freight cars, but by hanging around, I was able to check out the TTX (ex-Pennsy) flat car.  This car came in to HVRM lettered as TTX # 475037, but we have no idea as to the original Pennsy car number.  I checked out the replacement roller bearing trucks on the car and found that one set of trucks was numbered for TTX # 475062.  Perhaps this was the original PRR number!  So I checked the other truck to see if it carried the same number.  NO!  It was numbered for TTX # 251776.  What kind of a Trailer Train car carried that number?   So....no closer yet to an answer!   Steve Newland was removing the rotten wood siding boards from the west side of the northwest corner of Grasselli Tower.  Steve made the sad discovery that the diagonal boards under the wood siding was also rotten.  Now he must replace the underlayment in this area too!   When the boys finished the brake tests on the freight cars, it was getting on near 5 o'clock and I called it a day.  The train crew was going to have to switch everything out, putting the cars that passed on one track and those that didn't pass on another, so that they could be worked on.  They had their work cut out for them, and it was going to take a while.  I had been out most of the day, going inside to help Fred for just a few minutes and then breaking for a cup of coffee.  By the end of the day, I was pretty cold and threw in the towel and let old man winter win this one.  Spring is on the horizon.  I will fight another day!   Hang in there everyone!   Les

Windy day at HVRM 3-12-11

Hi!   A cloudy and very windy day at Hoosier Valley this Saturday.  With wind gusts up to 35 mph, the mid-40 temps didn't give much warmth.   The weather didn't stop Cory Bennett, Dave Cook, John LaOrange and Mark Knebel from getting the payloader and the "new" backhoe out and start replacing worn out ties on the main line track just east of the depot building.   About 12 ties were replaced by lunchtime with the backhoe making much easier work of the project.  Rather than the old way of digging out the old ties and then using a set of tie tongs to drag them free from under the rails, and then digging out the ballast so that the same set of tongs could pull the new ties into place using a good dose of old fashioned muscle, the backhoe just pulled out the old ties and pushed the new ties into place.  Thank heaven for progress!!   The 310 was fired up and with Elmer Mannen running the old girl and Bill Dauber sitting in the firemans seat, the crew went to work sorting out cars that were going to be used for our future vintage freight photo opportunity.   John DeGan was the conductor while Doug Kosloske was brakeman for the exercise.   I went down to the Shop and found Joe Kingsbury, Joe Baker and Bob Jachim hard at work putting together the center wood benches for the MKT 13833 open air passenger-riding flatcar.  Steve Newland walked by and told me that the Long Island passenger car had been taken down to the wye earlier in the week and turned around so that the other side of the car could be painted.  Steve and I went in and looked at the car and saw that MIke Koehler had put the Brunswick Green paint on the roof and end of the car which already had the coat of Charcoal Gray paint.  The car number (2937) also was attached to the center of the car below the windows and the lettering for the "DIESEL" and "WATER" caps had also been applied.  Missing on that side is the LIRR herald.  The stencil was apparently incorrectly done and Mike has to have it re-made.  Nevertheless, that finished side of the car looks absolutely great!   I then went back and gave the two Joes and Bob a hand with the Katy flat car.  When they broke for lunch, a group of five high schoolers from Bishop Noll H.S. showed up for a tour and I took them around the museum.  The undefeated basketball team from Bishop Nolll had won their early sectional game being played at North Judson/San Pierre High School and they had to find some things to do while the later game was being played to determine their opponent for the game at night.  A nice bunch of young men!   After lunch, Bob Albert told me that he had gone down and done some repairs to the crossing flashers on State Route 10 that had been bumped by a snow plow earlier this winter.  He then put some new historic photos in the depot waiting room, including one of the C&O depot in Malden, donated by Jeff Kehler and the C&O Historical Society.  Bob also told me that while he was looking for info on the NickeI Plate Road's old Burr Oak depot which he thinks might have been sold and moved, he instead stumbled across the news that an old Lake Erie & Western depot still existed in Hibbard, Indiana, a fact he was quite shocked to discover.   We continued work on the flat car with some additional help from Randall Downs, finally getting all of the center seats put together and bolted in place.  The car is really looking good!   The track gang was joined by Rich Warner after lunch and put in 12 more ties.  Dave got the dump truck out and with the payloader filling it, dumped ballast next to the track with the new ties.  Eventually lighter stone will be put over this stone to extend the station platform.   The switch crew continued their work after lunch and eventually had 10 of the 12 freight cars for the vintage freight train sorted and placed on the runaround track.  Those cars included NKP boxcars 15797 and 15979, NKP gon 45622, C&NW boxcar 284, MDT refrigerator cars 13385 and 14070, N&W boxcar 54880, WCHX tank car 1114, N&W hopper car 40639 and Wabash wood boxcar 49114.  Doug had told me that there were going to be 12 freight cars and when I asked him, he said that the other two were still over by the shop building; PRR boxcar 607627 and TTX flat car 475037.  Some of these cars will have to be repainted and/or touched up and all must be mechanically inspected.   Andy Hershman was doing some welding in the shop today.  Steve was trying to dig out the location where the concrete pad for the Grasselli Tower steps leading down from the landing to the ground.  Not a fun job with our rocky soil.  Others at the museum today included Pat DeGan, Margrett Cook and Loretta Kosloske working in the depot and Tom McKee, Bruce Emmons, Bob Barcus, Andy Roeske and Jason Annen.  My apologies to those I missed mentioning.     A busy day for sure.   Have a good week everyone!   Les