Night ride and other stuff at HVRM on 10/24/15

Hello folks!

Board meeting at Hoosier Valley this morning.  Interesting discussions and reports.

We had a special Guest Engineer after the meeting.

Tom Travis, Bud Tibbie and I moved the new screen doors that Ross Robinson has built for B&LE caboose #1989 into the GTW caboose for safekeeping.  We will try to work on these after the Bessemer caboose is taken out of service once the passenger train season ends in December.

I tried to repair some of the brick in the pathway leading into the Erie shed.  Worked out okay, except I have to spread some sand in between the various reworked brick.

I did some more lettering on the door of the Road Crossing Watchman's Shanty.  The day had been mild but cloudy and threatening all day and then all of a sudden, the sky opened up and we got a very heavy shower for a good 10 minutes.  We need the rain.  With things now wet, I wandered down to the Shop and found work ongoing on the track at the back end of the West Annex of the Shop.  The first photo shows Dave Cook (left) and Tom Rainford, spreading stone amongst the now leveled track while Tom Travis looks on.  The second shot shows Cory Bennett in the Payloader getting set to pick up the stone and move it toward the back wall for the boys to get to it easier.  In the third photo, Tom is getting a shovel full out of the bucket while the others spread theirs in between the ties.  Next job to be done before adding the cement floor will be to tamp the ballast down between the ties.

Bob Barcus was Conductor for the Halloween Train to La Crosse today and he got ahold of some of us to try to find some car hosts for the run.  I ended up hosting folks in the B&LE caboose.  Others similarly employed included Tom Travis, Bud Tibbie, Joe Kingsbury, Randall Downs, Matt Downs and Richard Warner.  Doug Kosloske was engineer with Bob Albert as fireman/front end brakeman.  John DeGan fired up Alco # 310 as standby motive power.  This train is our only train of the day and leaves at 4:00 p.m. with a special live animal show outside of the La Crosse Library for riders.  Departure from La Crosse is about 6:00 which means a night ride back to the museum.  Doug lights up his kerosene marker lights on the caboose for the return trip and I tried to get a shot of those markers after our arrival back at the North Judson depot (photo 4).   Also tried to get a shot looking down the track toward Grasselli Tower, the Shop building and some of our signals, the results of which are shown in the last photo.

Have a great week everyone!

Les