October comes in cool and wet at Hoosier Valley 10/1/16

Greetings -

Was raining like crazy this morning so got a late start to the museum.  Rain slacked off but occurred at intervals all during the day with temps only in the 60's.

Arrived in time to see the last guest engineer arrive back at the North Judson depot.  Motive power for it, and for the passenger trains later in the day, was the 95-ton G.E. Interlake Steel diesel, number 11.  Performed flawlessly all day!

One of the problems encountered this day was a brake problem on EJ&E # 184, our transfer caboose with the wheel chair lift.  It had to be left on the caboose track and was not part of todays consist.  More on this in a moment. 

Joe Baker was putting some preliminary electrical work in the Pullman Troop Sleeper so that a new outlet would be available for future cleanups (read vacuum cleaner) of the car.

I took some measurements of the seats on GTW transfer caboose number 75072, then spent the day flagging Mulberry Street during train movements.

Meanwhile, things were active in the Shop.  Some work was done on the track extension of track number 3 in the West Annex.  It was decided to replace the damaged exhaust stack on Erie Lackawanna ALCO # 310.  The first photo shows Cory Bennett (at left) and Dave Cook working on getting the new stack cut out of a piece of surplus pipe.  Meanwhile, EL 310 was fired up and, after the departure of the 12:30 p.m. train to English Lake, ran down and picked up the aforementioned EJ&E # 184 and brought it back into the shop.  The second, slightly blurry, photo was taken a bit later after the 184 had been spotted on Shop track 2 and shows Sparky Byers (near camera) and John LaOrange working on the brake problem.  Eventually the fix was performed successfully and the 184 was returned to the caboose track after the 2:00 passenger trains departure.

The third photo shows progress on C&EI tool car #A-1054 with Joe Baker at left and Joe Kingsbury standing at right.  The fourth photo is a close up of Joe Baker installing an electrical outlet in the car with Joe Kingsbury shown in photo 5 doing some carpentry work.

Finally, Steve Henrichs spent the day up in Grasselli Tower doing some painting.  The last photo shows the results of that work, with black Lever 36 and two blue levers 40 and 49 being added to those now finished.

Decent passenger counts for both English Lake trains.  John DeGan was engineer, Doug Kosloske conductor with Bud Tibbie, Randall Downs and Tom Rainford the car hosts for the day.

Loretta Kosloske was ticket agent in the depot with Bob Barcus manning the gift shop.

The rain is supposed to finally clear out of here with some nice 70 degree days forecast for next week.  Enjoy the early fall weather!

Les