Greetings all!
Managed to get to the museum at 9:00 a.m. after a brief, but heavy shower. Train crew were all wet but well into their efforts to get the cars inspected and ready for the first run. John DeGan and Bjarne Henderson were conductors while Andy Hershmann was the engineer of GE number 11 for the day.
The morning was cloudy, so I decided that this would be a good day to plant some concrete railroad posts in the east flower bed. One of these is of milepost 30 off of the xxx and was donated by xxxxx. The other is a C&EI Property Line post that was donated by xxxxxx. Both of these posts were donated many years ago and have been lying around the museum. Bing Risley and I thought that they should be put up somewhere and I decided that the east flower bed might be a good place. So, found the post hole digger and a narrow bladed shovel, and I went to work. Digging around the museum is always interesting because in many places, you have to dig through stone before you get down to the sand. Despite the fact that the sun had now come out and the humidity was on the rise, I finally managed to get both holes dug to the necessary depth.
Bill Gustason and some of his rail historian friends stopped by prior to their search for abandoned railroad right-of-ways in the area. Bill was a big help in setting us on the path to eventually acquire Grasselli Tower.
Meanwhile, John LaOrange and Mark Knebel were tearing up the wood floor in C&EI number A-1054, ex-U.S. Army kitchen car #325. Although this car has had fire damage, the wood floor was not coming up easy! John and Mark also had to break for a while to put a new tie in the museum main line after discovery of a really bad tie. Then back to the wood floor on A-1054.
Steve Newland and Fred Boyer put the first of the cast iron radiators back on the wall in Grasselli Tower. This particular radiator was the one "shorty" in the group due to the fact that it went on the wall with the door. All of the other radiators are long and will require more bodies to manhandle them into place. Fred had put the two timers back up in Grasselli last week, and I've included a photo of those two installed timers.
A group arrived for the first train to English Lake, the first of three groups to ride today. Bob Barcus reported 99 passengers for the day. The last train to La Crosse again went out in a "push" mode, due to the fact that one of the switches on the wye up a La Crosse remains out of service.
Joe Baker was working on installing electricity for the recently restored ICRR caboose. He's now getting close to getting that project finished!
Bing showed up with his machine to lift the two concrete posts into place, but we decided that we would use some strapping from the Shop. Bing requested short straps and I went over there to see what I could find. When I returned, Bing had gone over to help John and Mark with t he previously mentioned tie replacement, so while waiting, I wandered up to the Troop Sleeper to get out of the sun and temp which was now nearing 90 degrees. Saw the derailed cars on N gauge display layout so decided while I was waiting, that I would try to figure out how to get the top glass protection panels off. Was able to get the one off without too much of a problem. Rerailing N gauge equipment however is not fun! Probably didn't put things back in the proper order. Sorry about that Jon! Put the protection panel in place and screwed down again and then tried the other end of the layout. Couldn't get this panel removed and then Bing showed up, so abandoned the effort and went outside to help with the post planting.
Steve Newland wandered by and gave Bing and I a very welcome hand. The first post was the Milepost an quickly discovered that although the hole was deep enough, it wasn't wide enough! So a rather quick fix. The second effort was still not wide enough, so had some additional work with the post hole digger. Finally, the 3rd time proved to be the charm. The post slid down and was packed in. Then came the C&EI Property Line marker. This one was shorter and the hole was wide enough, and the post slid on down. Photos are included. We shall see how they hold up, before any additional work is done to them.
Someone had given the old Pennsylvania milepost marker 399 a new coat of white paint. Since I had run all of the tools involved with the concrete post project down to the Shop, I decided that I'd try to paint the two number 399's on the post in some black paint. Managed to do a decent, but far from neat, job. Hope it is adequate.
With the train not yet returned from La Crosse, and a bit bushed from the weather, I decided to call it a day at about 3:30 p.m.
Summer is here folks. Enjoy it!
Les
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