Greetings!
Beautiful Saturday in North Judson with temps in the low 70's! Day started out with a Board meeting in the new meeting car; HVRM # K-325 while Alco 310 was todays motive power for two guest engineers.
Work was done during the past week on new boards for the passenger platform at the museums depot (see photo 1). Ten rows still have to be taken out and replaced with new boards to finish up the project. Understand that additional work may be done this upcoming week.
Mark Knebel continued working this past week on Chicago and North Western 40' boxcar number 284. Since half of the roof walk was still in place, he tackled instead the cleaning and priming of the two ends of the car and the "B end" result is shown in the second photo. After the Board meeting, Bob Albert continued cutting the rivets on the roof walk and by the lunch time break, was down just to the sections on the "A end" of the car as shown in pix number 3. We still need to get some stencils cut for the slogans on this "billboard" box car and for the other lettering.
I started by digging out a can of the old light green paint from the first floor of Grasselli Tower and although I worked on it for quite a while, couldn't get the paint mixed well enough to use. I had hoped to apply the paint to the new coal bin lid for the Mulberry Street shanty, but that project had to be put aside for the day.
Then Cory Bennett went by the shanty on the backhoe carrying a section of rail heading east. Bob Jachim told me that they were going to be replacing a section of broken rail, so I wandered down there and gave them a hand. The 4th shot shows John La Orange working on removing the nut from one of the track bolts and the cracked rail can be seen. The broken rail section can be better seen in the fifth photo after the broken off section was removed. Cory got the rail clamp on the longer section of broken rail, and he can be seen in the 6th shot removing it with the backhoe while John tries to balance it. The new section of 105# rail that John had measured and that Tom Rainford cut last week, fit like a glove, and rail joiners were reapplied, track bolts put in and tightened and the rail re-spiked. Another job well done by the HVRM "Gandy Dancers". Others working on the replacement were David Cook, Tom and myself.
Bob Barcus, Loretta Kloske and Tom Travis worked the depot, while Bjarne Henderson was engineer for the train with Steve Henrichs as conductor and Stephen Bulla as student conductor. Mike Healy was car host on both trains and Tom Travis also hosted on the second train for some folks riding on EJ&E transfer caboose # 184.
Supposed to be some good weather this upcoming week with temps in the mid-70's. Have a great week. Drive safely and say a prayer for the folks in Florida and also those impacted by Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Louisiana.
Les
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