Greetings!
Old man winter decided to throw a red board (see photo 1) at Spring today at HVRM. Temps in the low to mid 30's with a howling wind (gusts up to 50 m.p.h.) with snow squalls at times interspersed with sunshine.
Doug and Loretta Kosloske worked in the depot and put away items from last Saturday's Easter trains. The second photo shows Loretta up in the depots attic after Doug had handed her an Easter basket!
It had been decided to replace some of the bad ties in front of the depot, and the rest of the photos show the track gang at work. The crew consisted of Dave Cook (medium gray hooded sweatshirt), Cory Bennett (red cap), Tom Rainford (dark cap), John La Orange (brown knit hat and tan hooded jacket) and Mark Knebel (light gray hooded sweatshirt). Although the removal and placement of ties is now mechanical (our machine itself is interesting to operate), today we went back to spiking by hand. Mark is in the last photo is shown with the spike maul in his hands, while Tom is in the background keeping the tie tight to the rail. Mark did almost all the spiking of the seven ties before running out of steam. Us old guys tried to give him some assistance with John La Orange putting in two spikes on the last tie and yours truly doing just one. But Mark had to do the very last spike. The wind was so bad that the railroad push cart (seen in the background in a couple of the photos), all of a sudden took off down the track and I had to go chase it before it ended up out on Main Street!
While we were doing track work, things were happening over in the Shop. John DeGan tightened the screws on the engineers seat in S1 Alco # 310. Sparky Byers replaced an oil line in GE diesel # 11. Joe Kingsbury continued his work on C&EI tool car # A-1054. Bob Albert worked on the IC 9914 display caboose on which he finally had to close the door as the snow was blowing it too hard. Margrett Cook made Sloppy Joes and other goodies for lunch. And just for the record, the track crew wasn't the only work being done outside. In the morning, Joe and Rich Warner worked on the air conditioning unit on the Long Island coach, # 2937. Not a day for air conditioning, but Old Man Winter can't hold on forever! Spring will win out in the end!
Have a great week everyone.
Les
No comments:
Post a Comment