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