Easter egg trains and great weather at HVRM 4/15/17

 

Greetings -

Got a call from the Indiana Harbor Belt on Friday, 4/14/17, that they would be willing to make a permanent loan of the model board from Dolton Tower to HVRM.  Recently Tom Rainford and I had gone to Dolton to pick up some items for Grasselli Tower from the decommissioning of Dolton and which we now have at Hoosier Valley.  So, I stopped by this morning and with quite a bit of help, managed to get the board loaded into my van.  When I made it to the museum, Bob Albert, Tom Rainford, Bud Tibbie and Kevin Kennedy, helped get the model board unloaded and put up in the Pullman Troop Sleeper, one of our display cars (see photo 1).

Today was the day for our Easter Egg trains, and what a beautiful day it turned out to be!   Temps got up into the low 80's, the sun shone most to the day and a stiff breeze kept it very comfortable!   The three trains were filled to capacity.  Steve Henrichs was engineer, John DeGan fireman, Doug Kosloske conductor with Bud Tibbie, Joe Kingsbury, Kevin Kennedy, Tom Rainford amongst those who did car host duties for the various trains.  GE end cab diesel #11 started out as motive power.

Mark Knebel and Bob Jachim handled road flagging work out at Indiana 10/39.   Loretta Koslosle and Bob Barcus manned the depot today, while Louise Kingsbury, her daughter and granddaughter assisted with the egg works. 

There was a problem with the air on Erie Lackawanna # 310 and the second photo shows Jason Ciatsko (on ground), Rich Warner (on running board) and John La Orange (on the opposite side of the Alco) working to get the problem fixed.  Good thing as number 11 had some problems with dirty valves on the second run of the day and 310 had to handle the back half of the egg trains.

Meanwhile, Ross Robinson had made a Maquette (pattern) for the windows for the 2789 and sent it to me from the north country.  The third photo shows the maquette with the channels for the windows of the Kanawha viewable in the background.  I then checked them against the actual channels in the 2-8-4's windows and, as you can see in the fourth photo (engineers window) and the fifth photo (fireman's window), they fit quite nicely and move past each other with no problems.

Sparky Byers was trying to cut some of the rusted material out of the cab of ND&W Porter diesel # 5332, as can be seen in the 6th picture.

The 7th and 8th photos shows the scene at the park where the kids on the train search for eggs, bring them to the Easter Bunny for their "goodies" and some photos.

Finally, the next to last shot shows Bjarne Henderson (with the long pole) and Joe Kingsbury applying paint to the one side of C&EI tool car # A-1054 while in the last photo, the earlier results of their work are shown on the opposite side.

Lots of work today at the museum, to make the operation a terrific success!

Happy Easter to all!

Les