| 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 | 
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