Greetings -
The first photo in this weeks report is actually from last Saturday and shows the progress made by Mark Knebel on the repainting of Grand Trunk Western transfer caboose # 75072. At that time, Mark had scraped, primed and painted the roof of the caboose with a new coat of Morency Orange paint. Mark has continued the work this past week in between rain showers, and also has one end of the car painted.
I started out today, swinging into Porter, Indiana to pick up the back panel of the model board that was at Dolton Tower. Arrived at the museum just as Bjarne Henderson was bringing the lift over so that we could "clean up" the outside of the Pullman Troop Sleeper. We used a process described on the Rail Preservation News website, which is too lengthy to get into in this report although it involved much elbow grease, linseed oil soap and linseed oil itself. The second photo shows Bjarne at work on the car and the third shows Lars Henderson (up on the ladder) and Tom Rainford, working on one end of the car. Finally, in the fourth shot, the finished work is shown. In addition to those mentioned, Bob Albert and Kevin Kennedy also assisted in moving the heavy ramp up to the car, and then putting it back into place at the end.
We had two guest engineers this morning and ran both passenger trains to English Lake. Steve Henrichs was engineer with John DeGan handling conductor duties. Doug Kosloske handled the road flagging while Loretta Kosloske manned the depot and ticket window.
Lunch in our Nickel Plate Road camp car today came from the Blue Jay Restaurant in town and included fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. Yum!
With the upcoming completion of Hoosier Valley table/meeting car #K-325, it was decided that it would be a good time to do some work on the storage track where K-325 and NKP camp (kitchen) car X58538 will be sitting. Using GE # 11, the cars at the east end up to X58538, were pulled out and moved over to the south run around track. The fifth photo shows the empty track and with a number of the old, rather rotten ties, already removed. The string of cars pulled out can be seen over to the far right in the picture. The 6th shot shows Cory Bennett operating the back hoe and pulling ties out. The 7th photo shows Kevin Kennedy pulling spikes from one of the soon-to-be-removed ties while the 8th shot shows Tom Rainford removing some of the debris from a yanked tie. Others working on the project included Mark and John LaOrange. We started the work on the track after lunch and got barely half way. Much to do next week! Help always appreciated!
Bing Risley was cutting grass around the museum today. A job that we have to continually do so that it doesn't get ahead of us!
Doug and Loretta had to leave after the second English Lake train departed at 2:00 p.m., so Tom Travis came in and handled the depot duties thereafter. The 9th photo shows Tom behind the counter while member Tom Royce is off to the right in the shot.
Finally, the last photo shows the arrival of the second train back in North Judson and passengers unloading from MKT open car # 13833 using the steps of Long Island passenger car # 2937 to detrain. Museum personnel assisting in the unloading include Jake Denton (at left), Joe Kingsbury (black cap/plaid shirt), John DeGan (orange cap/yellow vest) and Rich Warner (blue cap/black shirt). Another safe run completed!
Hope everyone has a safe, and enjoyable, Memorial Day weekend!
Les
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