| Greetings! Arrived at the museum about 9:15 a.m. and was surprised to see 4 Mid-America passenger cars parked on the track on the north side of the Shop building. I had heard reports that the Keystone Grill and Mohave were coming back, but didn't know about the coach and combine. Interesting! I signed in and then found Tom Travis already working on WCHX # 1114, the museums single dome tank car. So I joined in as we attached missing lock washers and nuts to the bolts securing the wood running boards that circle the car. Many of these bolts are located in hard to get to locations and a hot sun burning down on us, didn't help our efforts. The weather report for the day called for storms to arrive in the afternoon, and we hoped for some clouds, but got nothing but bright blue skies all morning. Bob Barcus and Pat DeGan manned a lighter-than-normal crew in the depot and gift shop. Ticket sales for the day seemed to be doing okay for a hot summer day in August. John DeGan and Fred Boyer switched between engineer and fireman in the cabo of EL Alco #310, Bob Albert was the conductor with Randall Downs, Bill Dauber and Chris Kosary rounded out the crew. Elmer Mannen drew the job of driving out and flagging the various crossings when the train was pushing the consist outbound from the depot. Steve Newland worked on putting additional primer on the railings of the Grasselli Tower staircase. Steve had come down earlier in the week and started that part of the project. Broke for lunch in the NKP kitchen car, which included barbequed ribs, sausage and noodles, various sandwiches, a watermelon/cantelope/grape fruit salad and a number of different deserts. After lunch, Tom and I went back to the tank car to continue the last of the work on the bolts. Then after finishing, we grabbed a paint can and brushes and started in on painting the crossing watchman's Mulberry Street shanty. Again bright sun, and the small building only had two sides in the shade! Bing Risley helped me shove the coal box away from the one side of the shanty so I could paint behind it. In the meantime, the boys returned from putting ties in up near La Crosse. Cory Bennett reported that 44 ties were tamped and 25 new ties installed. He estimates that two more workdays should finish up the job. Besides Cory, the tie crew consisted of Mark Knebel, John LaOrange, Dave Cook and I think Cory mentioned someone else, but I didn't catch who that other person was. As Tom and I soldiered on in the sun (where are those clouds?), we got the usual comments about "it will start peeling next week" and "you missed a spot" and..., well, you get the idea. The clouds finally arrived just after Tom left to take some scrap metal over to the scrap piles located behind the Shop building. I walked down and put the can of light green paint back into the Shop then walked back to the shanty and grabbed the ladder and my paint brush and headed for the Erie building to clean up. By the time I had finished, the sky was getting very ominous. Signed out, and talked briefly with a couple of guys who had gotten permission to run their Milwaukee Road speeder over the museum trackage in North Judson. I headed for home at 5:15 and wasn't more than two miles from the museum before the skies opened up! Hope those guys in the motorcar didn't get too wet! Have a good week everyone. Schools are starting to go back, so be careful out there when driving. Les | 
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