Greetings!
The regular Bi-Monthly museum membership/business meeting was held this morning in the depot. Number of things were mentioned including the info from Loretta Kosloske that HVRM revenues are down about $9K from the same period last year, and confirmation of the report that the number of operators expressing an interest in operating the freight end of the railroad has been reduced by the Town of North Judson from 11 down to two. Those operators still in the running are Lake State Railway headquartered in Sawyer, Michigan and U.S. Rail Partners, with headquarters in Lemont, Illinois.
Our "Gandy Dancer" crew continued putting in new ties out toward the Main Street end of the museum. The first photo shows (from left) Kevin Kennedy, Todd Flanigan, Mark Knebel and Kyle Flanigan. Jason Ciastko also was a part of this work crew today. Kevin reported later that they had put 7 ties in and all were spiked down.
Tom Travis provided rural road crossing flagman protection today for the passenger trains and the guest engineer trains, except for the Mulberry Street crossing which was handled early by Bob Jachim and later in the day by Kevin Kennedy. The second photo shows the second scheduled passenger train arriving back in North Judson, with Kevin protecting the crossing at Mulberry. Todd was engineer today with Doug Kosloske conductor for both regular runs and for the Guest Engineers earlier in the day.
Bob Barcus manned the gift shop in the depot today with Loretta the ticket agent.
For some time now, the number boards have been missing on Whitcomb # 509 allowing rain to enter through the hoods. Decided it was time to put the number boards back in place. Tom Rainford made a neat aluminum replacement for the one number board that was missing and I painted the other three original ones at home during this past week. The third and fourth shots show Tom grinding some of the old screws off the frames in the hoods and in the fifth photo, Tom and I step back from our efforts to smile for the camera lens of Tom Travis. Also thanks to Bud Tibbie for assistance as we managed to get all four number boards put back in. Later in the day I started working on applying the numbers to the number boards, but that effort needs to be redone.
The next photo was taken in the West Annex of the Shop showing a string running from the end of the rail out toward the rear entrance of the building along with some dirt removed. Can we actually begun thinking of working on this track again? I saw David Cook a bit later and he said that a load of ties was on the way to the West Annex. Great news!
Margrett Cook provide lunch today in the NKP camp car.
Steve Newland painted the trim on the two end windows up on the second floor of Grasselli Tower and his efforts can be seen in photo 7.
Sparky Byers and Rich Warner continued their work on the 95-ton General Electric diesel. They say that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel now!
Finally, Mark Knebel has been using motor car #MW-2 to go out and check the track to English Lake each morning for any problems, and then using the car to go out to the area where they are doing track work on museum property. The last photo shows Mark waiting for Kevin to throw the switch so that he can run the car back into the Shop at the end of the day. I believe that this is former EJ&E car number 591.
The temps today were in the upper 70's but it's supposed to get hot again toward the end of next week. A special La Crosse Library run is scheduled for this coming Friday (July 22nd) and help is really needed. You don't have to be experienced. Here's a chance to come out and help the museum!
Note, photos in this report by Les Beckman, except as noted.
Have a good week everyone!
Les
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