| Greetings! Arrived in time for the Board of Directors meeting at 8:00 a.m. Gave an update on the Pennsy cabin car. Also got permission to repaint the 50' Pennsy flat car as a TTX car. Mark Knebel reported that more storage freight cars were on the way. Bob Barcus stated the there was no news on the diesel donation. There was an Executive Board meeting planned after the Directors meeting. Steve Henrichs was continuing with the painting of the roof of Grasselli Tower's second floor. He has a strip over the levers that remains undone and he told me that he had found some scaffolding in the Shop and asked if I could give him a hand in setting it up later in the day. He had to take a break and go to Knox for his train crew physical. Doug Kosloske conducted a training class for prospective Conductors. I believe that there were 5 or 6 in attendance. The train crew switched cars around and eventually made up the train for the passenger runs. Locomotive was GE # 11, LIRR coach # 2937, MKT open flat car # 13833, EJ&E transfer caboose # 184 and B&LE cupola caboose # 1989. John DeGan was engineer, Bob Albert conductor, Randall Downs, Bill Dauber and Joe Kingsbury were car hosts. Both the 11:00 and 1:30 runs to English Lake, appeared to have decent passenger loads with Mom's getting half price off of their tickets and a carnation too boot! Bob Barcus manned the gift shop and Loretta Kosloske handled ticket sales. I asked Loretta about a pot of new growth sitting on the depots "back porch" and she told me that she thinks it was a pot of black-eyed susan flowers last year but is not sure if the new growth is the same, or if it is just weeds. She asked me to plant it in one of our plant beds and we will see what develops. I did that, and cut back the old dried growth from last year. I looked over NKP camp car # X58538, which we have been using for years as our kitchen/eating car. Mark advised me in an e-mail last week, that he had given the car a new coat of light gray paint as it had started looking rather "ratty" recently. I had painted the reporting marks and car number after Mark had painted it the last time, and I guess I will eventually do it again, sometime later this year. Diane Bennett grilled hamburgers and hot dogs outside for lunch. Barcus received a number of nice tools from a former railroad signal maintainer and he and Mark unloaded the items from his pickup after lunch. Steve Henrichs finally got back from Knox and we set up the scaffolding in the tower and managed to get the plastic sheets pulled back over the levers to boot to keep any paint drippings off of them! Bjarne Henderson and Ed Keeler were painting the exterior of the Pullman Troop Sleeper and they needed the IC yellow caboose pulled up so that they could get to the ends. So Doug Kosloske fired up Alco # 310 and with Steve as brakeman, they managed to couple up to the caboose and pull it forward about 3 feet to give Bjarne and Ed enough room to do their painting on the troop sleepers end. After they had finished the move, Doug moved the 310 out in front of the shop so that is could be washed down for the summer and he and Steve were doing just that when I finally left for the day. Steve Newland was working on the windows of Grasselli, putting a new roller for the ropes holding the weights used to raise and lower these heavy windows. He then started putting the window locks in place. These are the locks that we salvaged from Calumet Tower before the IHB tore the building down last month. Steve had removed all of the old paint off of these locks and they now look wonderful in their original natural brass! I went back and looked at the Railway Express Trailer. The weight on the one section of buckled floor appears to be working and the buckled area has dropped quite a bit over the last week. We shall see how it looks next week! I did some searching for possible metal to use in the two ruined side doors of the trailer and possibly found some candidates. Will need to have someone torch them to size. Hopefully I can find someone to do it. I also managed to remember my camera, and took a few photos of the ends of TTX 50' flat car # 475037, where we are considering eventually putting the REA trailer after it is restored. A group from the Southern Appalachia Railway Museum located in Tennessee, had approached HVRM for a "rare mileage", off the beaten track" trip and the 2:45 run to La Crosse was extended up the old Pere Marquette to run to South Thomaston. I'm not sure exactly how many folks made that trip, but I talked to a number of them during the day as they inspected our facilities while they waited for their run. Folks came from a number of different places including Kansas, Pennsylvania, California, and the state of Washington, amongst other "far away" places. Just before that scheduled departure, the cloudy but rather mild day, took a turn for the worse with a strong wind coming up and temps dropping down into the mid-50's, although the sun finally came out. Well, today is Mother's Day. Don't forget to at least call your Mom if you can. Have a great week everyone! Les | 
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