Illinois donation and work at HVRM 4/23/16

Hi Folks -

HVRM member Bud Tibbie was a member of the Homewood Rail Committee when he lived in Illinois when that group secured the donation of an EMD rebuilt diesel and a wide vision caboose and put them on display near the Amtrak/Metra station there.  As part of that display, a Gulf, Mobile & Ohio color position light (CPL) signal was to be installed but that was never done.  Bud contacted the Mayor of Homewood and the committee and it was eventually decided to donate the signal head to Hoosier Valley.  This morning, Bud, Joe Gasiorek and myself, met Bill Wolfete (sp?) from the committee at the display in Homewood and we loaded the signal head into my car and took it to the museum today.  Here are some photos taken by Betty Beckman this morning showing the removal of the signal head.  That's Bill on the walkway of the diesel in photo one while Joe and I look on.  The second photo shows Bud taking the signal head out of the compartment in the diesel and the third photo shows Joe and I receiving it.  Once we got the signal head to the museum, Mark Knebel, Bob Albert, Bud and I put it into the museums signal storage car.

The rest of these photos show some activities at the museum today.  The fourth photo shows Bob getting set to put up a new photo in IC caboose # 9914.  The photo shows a Monon passenger train led by their F3 units at the deport in Monon, Indiana.  Bob recently put a new piece of rail on display in the caboose as shown in the fifth photo. 

Steve Newland was scraping old paint from Grasselli Tower today.

The ex-Union Pacific tamper (photo 6) was out today doing its thing.  After the stones were tamped, Tom Rainford is shown in photo 7 filling the holes made after the tamper finished its job.   Bob Jachim, Kevin Kennedy and myself, also assisted Tom on this effort.

To finish on a bummer note, the last photo shows a bit of graffiti that was apparently recently applied to our Purdue crane.  The police were notified and came out and took our complaint.  We will need to get this "criminal act" removed as soon as possible.

Finally, on the way home, I followed the museum line into La Crosse and noted a lot of covered hoppers apparently stored.  I counted about 200 similar looking gray painted cars, with CTIX (and other) reporting marks.  There were also a mixed bag of about 25 covered hoppers just to the east of downtown La Crosse.  All of  these cars were parked on the main line.

We are getting close to our initial passenger train operation in May. Any help will be appreciated.

Les