Working on the railroad (museum) 8/26/17!

 

Greetings!

Marvelous day at Hoosier Valley today with temps in the 70's.  Can this be August?

Kevin Kennedy and Mark Knebel took the museum motorcar and a 4 wheel flat out to the west side of the Kankakee River bridge and dumped 57 pails of stone ballast onto a low spot.

We had a guest engineer this morning hosted by the train crew of Doug Kosloske (engineer), Steve Henrichs (conductor) and Stephen Bulla (student conductor).  The first photo shows EL Alco # 310 moving west past the Penn Central boxcar that Mark painted and lettered.  A bygone era briefly recreated!

Bob Jachim was Mulberry Street flagman in the morning, I handled it for a while later and Kevin then finished that job.   Tom Rainford provided flagman protection at the other grade crossings all day.

Bob Albert was car host for the two passenger runs.  Tom Travis was station agent handling ticket sales while Bob Barcus took care of the depot gift shop.  Margrett Cook provided lunch.  

Joe Kingsbury spent most of his day, needle scaling ND&W Porter # 5332, as can be seen in the second shot.  A messy, and very noisy, job!  Ear protection a must!

There was work being done today on the track on the west side of the Shop and the third photo shows John LaOrange in the Payloader, moving various items around while David Cook works at removing a stubborn spike from a tie.  After Dave finished and took a break, I pulled a few spikes out of ties after which I retired from any further trackwork for the day!  The work continued on that track during the day and by the afternoon, a frog had been put in and a section of rail attached (photo #4) headed back toward the entrance into the west side of the Shop.

I spent most of my day hosting visitors up in Grasselli Tower while also trying to replace the rotten lid on the coal bin next to the Mulberry Street Road Crossing Shanty.  The fifth photo show the coal bin with the lid removed while Tom Travis was nice enough to take a photo of myself with  the rebuilt lid at the end of the day (photo 6).

Finally, with PC boxcar #153177 now finished, Mark has decided to move on to a new project; Chicago and North Western "Billboard" boxcar # 284.  The last shot shows the train crew shoving C&NW # 284 back toward the Shop with Long Island passenger coach # 2937 between the boxcar and the 310.

Ended up the day with the battery dead on my van.  Kudos to Bob Barcus for coming to my rescue with a brand new set of jumper cables!  

Have a great week everyone.  Labor Day weekend coming next week.

Les