| Greetings! Short day today due to early departure for another event. Arrived at 8:45 a.m. and left at 2:15 p.m. Also arriving today was Spring; from a cool night, a brisk south wind brought temps quickly into the upper 50's upon arrival and touched 70 by the time I left for the day. Started out talking to Bob Barcus in the gift shop and making a purchase, getting my members discount, which is always nice. I noticed that the museums signals were on and operating. Always good to see. A crew had been at the museum on Friday, April 5th, to put in the rest of the new ties between Mulberry Street and the walkway leading from the parking lot over to the depot building. John LaOrange, Bob Jachim, Cory Bennett, Steve Henrichs, Dave Cook and Mark Knebel had the museums dump truck and payloader out and were moving ballast over to the site and had two air hammers working to drive the stone under the ties. This area really looked nice when the boys were finished. I went over to Bessemer & Lake Erie caboose #1989 to take some door dimensions for a possible future project. Time will tell if this one gets approved. Rich Warner and Steve Newland continued their work on the G gauge layout extension in the depot. The new through truss bridge in the stations operators bay area looks cool. Steve Henrichs purchased a roll of metal flashing as a possible answer to the holes that are along the bottom edge of the yellow IC caboose. Fred Boyer and Doug Kosloske both liked the idea of using this method to repair the many holes in the cars lower body. Meanwhile, Bob Albert continued working on the cabooses interior. Doug Kosloske was spray painting clearance points on various switches on the property. I spent some time trying to figure out the crossing control box that is in the IC caboose. This was donated to us and was supposedly from the Pennsy's West Pullman Tower where the old Panhandle crossed the Illinois Central's electrified branch line that ran out to Blue Island, Illinois. This past week, I was able to pull up a schematic of the trackwork at West Pullman, showing that the tower originally had an 18 lever interlocking maching. I could not figure out whether the crossing gate control box could have been in the West Pullman tower itself, or if there was a separate structure for that gate control box. Diane Bennett and Margrett Cook made a very tasty lunch and after the meal, the gandy dancer track crew from this morning, went down to tackle some bad ties on the crossover switches east of the depot. I gave them a hand for about an hour and a half, before I had to leave. With spring weather now appearing to finally be here, it looks as if we are going to get a number of days with rain this coming week. Stay dry everyone! And have a great week. Les | 
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