Nice day at Hoosier Valley 7/9/16

Greetings -

Got to the museum a bit too late to attend the Board meeting.  Had a bad day yesterday when the wife and I had to put down our 12 year old Black Lab, Casey.  Tough decision, and I'm still not over it.  Anyway, it was a great day weatherwise with sun all day, a nice breeze and a high temp of 78 degrees.  I passed out the report on the EMD SW-1 to all of the Board members.  The unit is former Monon number 5 and has been offered to the museum.  Board will look over the report and make a decision.

Mark Knebel and Jason Ciastko were hard at work again on the Main Street (east) end of the museum putting in replacement ties.  The first photo shows Mark, with Jason adjusting his glasses, after another tie was put in.  Mark tells me that they have put in 51 ties on the various tracks down at that end.  Well done!

I opened up Grasselli Tower and had a few visitors during the day.  Steve Newland continued his work on the exterior trim on a couple of the windows on the second floor.

Work continued on G.E. diesel number 11 with Sparky Byers, Dave Cook, Rich Warner, John La Orange and Tom Rainford hard at it.

Later, John La Orange did some sorting of items on the storage racks in the East Annex of the Shop.

Bing Risley was out cutting grass.

Engineer of Alco 310 for the two guest engineers and the two passenger runs to English Lake today was John DeGan, with Steve Henrichs the conductor.  Bob Barcus manned the gift shop in the depot while Loretta Kosloske did her usual great job as ticket agent.

Bud Tibbie was the road crossing flagman all day.  The second photo shows Bud giving the "thumbs up" to Henrichs sitting in the fireman's seat of the 310 on the last train of the day as it crossed Mulberry Street on its way back to the depot.

Note the third photo, which was taken as we were shutting down for the day.  Over 20 folks lined up on the road leading up to the Shop!  What was their interest directed to?  The last photo shows what they were looking at; Kanawha 2789 being put away by the train crew.  Even though she's "dead", she is still an impressive site to visitorskev!

Enjoy the upcoming week!

Les