| Howdy! Well, it's spring in name only here in northwestern Indiana this March. Temps continue to be below normal. Temp at 10:00 a.m. today was 37 degrees and although we had sun all day, temps never got out of the 40's. AND, a winter (early Spring?) storm is due in the area tomorrow with snowfall forcast to be between 3 and 6 inches. Bah humbug! Matt Lasayko, Fred Boyer, Ryan Schultz, Zack Gillihan, Mitch Gillihan and yours truly, spent this past Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at the Indiana Harbor Belt's Calumet Tower in East Chicago, Indiana. You may recall that when the IHB donated Grasselli to us, there were certain things missing, including timers and a number of the levers. Calumet Tower was taken out of service earlier this month, and before it is torn down, the IHB was gracious and let us get in there to pull out those items missing from Grasselli. Calumet is (was) a 96 lever tower (Grasselli is 68) but even then some of those 96 levers were missing. Over the 3 days (I missed Tuesday), we managed to pull out all of the remaining levers, rocker plates, lever electric boxes, relays, relay panel doors, window locks and other hardware. Good to know that some of Calumet will live on at Grasselli. It was a day for "bugs" at HVRM today. The plan was to fire up EL Alco #310 and pull out the recently worked on Long Island commuter coach and do some switching so that the Easter Bunny trains for next Saturday, would be all set to go. Unfortunately, the S-1 never quite got LIRR #2937 completely out of the Shop. The first thought was sticking brakes and then corroded cotacts. Turns out after a thorough inspection, that the voltage regulator suffered some damage. Matt pulled it out and will take it home for repairs. Matt showed up with the tower parts from Calumet mid-morning. There is a door panel missing on Grasselli's first floor electrical cabinets and one thing I did when at Calumet was to remove a left and right side panel door even though I wasn't sure that they were the same size, but hoping they were since the towers were probably originally built at about the same time. I grabbed my tape measure this morning and checked them out. Turns out the widths were exactly the same, but with Calumet being a bigger tower, the cabinets were taller along with the doors (112" vs. 96"). Steve Newland thought that he could modify them to look the same so I put the two panels inside Grasselli's lower floor. Speaking of Steve N., he was working in the depot on the G gauge extension. Rich Warner had the new 8' long through truss bridge on display. This bridge will be in the depots operators bay. Louise Kingsbury and Loretta Kosloske were in the depot stuffing gift bags for the kids on next Saturdays Easter trains. Bob Jachim continued working on putting new handles on some of those sledge hammers and spike mauls that were broken over the winter. Bjarne Henderson and his son Lars, continued working on our Pullman Troop Sleeper. At Bob Barcus's request, I ran some shipping boxes up to the North Judson post office for mailing. The museum is doing a good business selling items on line. Lunch was furnished by Diane Bennett with fresh lettuce/tomato/mushroom salad, hot potato soup, pulled pork sandwiches, home made potato salad and a number of other "goodies". Chocolate Swirl ice cream and various cookies for desert. After lunch, I walked down and started helping Matt Downs, John LaOrange, Bob Albert, Tom Travis, Steve Newland and Matt Lasayko with unloading the Calumet Tower items into a museum boxcar for inside storage. With the Alco down, attention turned to GE #11. Attempts were made to "warm up" the oil in the unit, but after working all afternoon, the operating crew threw in the towel. Bugs! The Payloader was fired up and managed to push S-1 # 310 and LIRR 2937 back into the Shop. Efforts to do the necessary switching will be made during this upcoming week. Bob Albert continued working on the rehab of the ex-IC yellow display caboose. Dave Cook, Bing Risley, Cory Bennett and Mark Knebel spent the day putting in a new wire fence on the steel fence posts that they had pounded in last winter before the cold weather shut the project down. This fence line separates the museum property around the old, now torn down, Erie milk station from neighbors in that area. The east fence and new gate were nearly finished when Tom Travis and I went over to see their progress. They finished that east side fenceline and moved over to the north side. The fence was laid out and Cory hitched up his truck to pull the fence tight before attaching it to the posts. But that "bug" struck again and Cory couldn't get his truck to fire up. When I left for the day, they were still working on the truck. Have a good week everyone. Keep those shovels handy! Les | 
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