Late summer day at Monticello

Gents -

Went to the Monticello Railway Museum today for Railroad Days and took this late afternoon shot of Southern Railway #401 departing Nelson's Crossing for the Monticello,

Illinois depot.  Nice weather today and an enjoyable time riding, viewing and photographing, the various trains and venues at MRM.

Les 

Different work goes on at HVRM 9/19/15

Folks -

Lots of different things going on at Hoosier Valley today, not everything as planned.  Which is normal!  No membership meeting today account lacking a quorum.

Day started out with drizzle and temps around 60, but guest engineers were in evidence as usual.  Steve Henrichs and John DeGan in the cab with Bob Albert as conductor.  I helped Tom Travis move the new screen doors that Ross Robinson made up in Canada for B&LE caboose #1989.  Ross is down in the U.S. for vacation and dropped the doors off at Tom's.  Terrific work by Ross!  Since the B&LE caboose is currently not running, we'll have a bit of time to put the doors in place.

Tom and I then went over to Fingerhut Bakery where Mr. Travis purchased a dozen donuts for the guys.  Yum!  Thank you Tom!

As the drizzle faded away, I moved out the last piece of furniture that had been in GTW transfer caboose #75072 and Mark Knebel and I hauled it down to C&NW box car #284 for storage.

Mark wanted to put our old equipment stencils into the now nearly vacant 75072 but noticed that there had been some leakage in the side wall of the car.  Turns out that the bucket that covered the stove opening had cracked and water was getting in.  I put the man lift over to the caboose and took off the bucket and spent the day, on and off, putting the old smoke jack back on.  The two photos show the before and after shots of the caboose, the first with the white bucket in place and the second showing the smoke jack, back where it belongs.

On one of my trips back to the Shop for parts, I found that the boys were working on putting ties and rails in the second bay of the West Annex.  A number of folks worked on this at times, but my photo shows David Cook in the foreground and Tom Rainford down at the back end of the track.

This work was delayed for a while due to some folks coming in to pick up some surplus oil in barrels that had been sold to them.

Fred Boyer was doing some needle scaling on C&EI tool car A-1054 (see fourth photo).

Mark moved some tables into GTW 75072 and laid out the stencils on them.  He is going to hang some of them from nails in the caboose walls.

Joe Baker was doing some electrical work on the NKP kitchen car (see fifth photo).

Good to see Ron Marquardt and Tom Kepshire at the museum today.  Ron is a retired Monon and L&N locomotive engineer and Tom runs the Monon Railroad Historical-Technical Society website.  Bob Albert asked if I could car host the trip to La Crosse, and so I took time to do that.  By this time the sun had come out, temp moved into the 70's and a nice crowd had showed up to ride both of the museum train trips.  I took time to take a shot of some of the crowd reloading in La Crosse (last photo).

Have a good week everyone!

Les

 

  

Cool Working Saturday At HVRM 9-12-2015

 

Folks -

Below is Tom Travis's museum report for Saturday, 9/12/15.  I've also added a short

addition at the end.

Les

 

 

Greetings to all,
 
Saturday morning dawned at 53 degrees, cool for this time of the year. Over to the
west were rain showers, to the east was sunny. Down in North Judson it was right
in the middle, sun, wind, no rain. Sort of a perfect day.
 
Arrived around 8 AM to the museum. The Erie 310 was already outside, pulled the
C&O 2789 outside. Board meeting to start at 8am an was over by 9am. The big item
was to put gravel down at the city park for the fall trains, so unloading/loading could
be accomplished. Getting the used oil in barrels sold or removed from the museum.
Cleanup of scrap metal was high on the list also.
 
Soon after the meeting was over, Cory pulled the trailer over to the scrap metal pile
an was promptly filled up with scrap metal. Made a sizeable dent in the pile, with
one more trailer load to be loaded up next week. The sides of the trailer will be taken
off for boxes of pumpkins for the park. Two potties will be put down at the city park
for the month of October. This should speed up things for loading trains back up.
 
Steve Newland was noted working on removing old paint from Grasselli tower, an putting
primer on the wood.
 
I was asked to be a car host on the 12:30pm train to English Lake. Getting back to HVRM,
the train was made ready for the yearly trip up rare mileage track to Thomaston. Again
I rode the train on the EJ&E transfer caboose running the chair lift for a couple of passengers.
The trip was getting breezy out of La Crosse, but moved inside out of the wind. A short
stop at La Crosse while the Erie 310 was run around the wye for the return trip to North
Judson. Train arrival was a little before 5pm. Most of the HVRM volunteers rode the train.
Only a couple of people remained at the museum. A good time was had by everyone.
A good crowd on both trains today.
 
Fred Boyer had a large group of friends on the 12:30 trip using the EJ&E caboose.
Fred also did some needlegunning on the east end of the tool car.
John LaOrange put in a string of lights in the tool car for better visibility inside.
Matt Lasayko installed some new security cameras today.
 
Next Saturday is membership meeting at 8am in the depot. Have a safe week..
 
Tom

An addition for Monday, September 14th.  Ended up going to the museum today and working

on passenger coach #899.  Couple of photos included showing the car partially painted below

the window rail (I used the lift today), a second shot from the end showing the poor previous

paint results and the final result at the end of today.  Also discovered that Mark Knebel had

painted the Whitcomb and he showed up to finish some of the hand rails.  Two photos of

the Whitcomb are also included, one of which shows Mark at work.  I'm going to suggest

that we change the units number.  Years ago, we assigned number 27 to the Whitcomb as

we did not have the units history.  Now we have it and would like assign the number 950 to

the unit, which it wore when working for the Chicago Gravel Company.

Les

Cool Working Saturday At HVRM 9-12-2015

Greetings to all,
 
Saturday morning dawned at 53 degrees, cool for this time of the year. Over to the
west were rain showers, to the east was sunny. Down in North Judson it was right
in the middle, sun, wind, no rain. Sort of a perfect day.
 
Arrived around 8 AM to the museum. The Erie 310 was already outside, pulled the
C&O 2789 outside. Board meeting to start at 8am an was over by 9am. The big item
was to put gravel down at the city park for the fall trains, so unloading/loading could
be accomplished. Getting the used oil in barrels sold or removed from the museum.
Cleanup of scrap metal was high on the list also.
 
Soon after the meeting was over, Cory pulled the trailer over to the scrap metal pile
an was promptly filled up with scrap metal. Made a sizeable dent in the pile, with
one more trailer load to be loaded up next week. The sides of the trailer will be taken
off for boxes of pumpkins for the park. Two potties will be put down at the city park
for the month of October. This should speed up things for loading trains back up.
 
Steve Newland was noted working on removing old paint from Grasselli tower, an putting
primer on the wood.
 
I was asked to be a car host on the 12:30pm train to English Lake. Getting back to HVRM,
the train was made ready for the yearly trip up rare mileage track to Thomaston. Again
I rode the train on the EJ&E transfer caboose running the chair lift for a couple of passengers.
The trip was getting breezy out of La Crosse, but moved inside out of the wind. A short
stop at La Crosse while the Erie 310 was run around the wye for the return trip to North
Judson. Train arrival was a little before 5pm. Most of the HVRM volunteers rode the train.
Only a couple of people remained at the museum. A good time was had by everyone.
A good crowd on both trains today.
 
Fred Boyer had a large group of friends on the 12:30 trip using the EJ&E caboose.
Fred also did some needlegunning on the east end of the tool car.
John LaOrange put in a string of lights in the tool car for better visibility inside.
Matt Lasayko installed some new security cameras today.
 
Next Saturday is membership meeting at 8am in the depot. Have a safe week..
 
Tom
 
           

A rather blue day at Hoosier Valley 9/5/15

Greetings one and all!

This past week has seen a return to summer with highs in the upper 80's and low 90's.  This was the forecast for North Judson today, but instead it was a cloudy, blue day all day long with light rain on and off keeping the temp down to around 80 degrees.  Supposed to jump back to the low 90's tomorrow and Monday (Labor Day) before dropping down into the normal upper 70's later in the week.

Crew brought out Erie Lackawanna 310 to use for the guest engineer program only to encounter a problem with the Alco's brakes.  They had to fire up the GE 95 tonner for the guest engineers, pushing the S1 down to the Shop.  Doug Kosloske worked on it, and got the brakes working and the 310 was used on the regular passenger runs later in the day.

Tom Rainford worked on a wheel problem on one of the push flats and got some assistance from Bud Tibbie.

Cory Bennett, using some lumber that Bud had furnished just last week, made an enclosure for one of our trailers (see photo 1) to use when hauling museum scrap to scrap dealers.  A very nice piece of work, but Cory was a bit blue himself when he couldn't get the lights to work on the trailer.  He is shown in the second photo working on the problem.  Not sure if it was fixed by  the end of the day or not.

Speaking of blue, the third photo shows Steve Henrichs painting one of the levers in Grasselli Tower in this color. 

I did a bit of lettering today and the fourth photo shows some of those results on the door of the Mulberry Street watchman's crossing.  There was going to be additional lettering, but the drizzle started up again so will have to finish at a later date.

Talked to a couple today in the Pullman Troop Sleeper.  They were having no luck finding the deer that Jon Oram had placed on the N scale display layout of North Judson that is located in that car.  Seems to get a lot of folks!  Seach on! 

Finally, and continuing the theme of today's report, the final photo shows a couple of pieces that Mark Knebel had previously painted in blue which he has now put together on one of the museums short display tracks after nicely lettering them.  Both of these maintenance-of-way pieces were originally EJ&E, with the railroad itself donating the Fairmont boom car to HVRM quite a few years ago and more recently, Ryan Kertis donating the push flat that was numbered G1 on the J.

Fly the flag on Labor Day and enjoy the holiday.   And have a safe week.

Les