On Saturday, September 3, our volunteers did a bunch of dirty work to get an old storage track ready to use. Dwight Maxey, Colin Mellin, Reid Adams, John McDowell, Pascal Bartilow, Justin Cesar and Paul Brown started the day by moving a couple of heavy items. First we moved a locomotive idler axle from the storage track to one of our shop lead tracks. The second item was a complete plain bearing freight truck assembly. For those less familiar, a “truck” in this case is a set of wheels that go under a train car. The freight truck was heavy enough that it required both of our lifts to move! The crew thought up a way to successfully get the move done. The freight truck is now on display in front of our D Street Shop building. I have included a few pictures of these moves taken by Reid and Dwight.

In the afternoon after lunch, Pascal, Colin and Justin did some work to our US Army crane to be able to install the batteries. The crew did work to clean out the battery box and get the battery cables ready for use. They were not able to put the batteries in place so that will come in the future. Reid and Paul worked to clean up weeds and prepare the old storage track for use as we will be moving some of our rail equipment to that track next week.

As mentioned above, next week we will be moving a number of pieces of our rail equipment around to different tracks and stuffing the old storage track that we opened up this week. As part of these moves we will be placing our Halloween car close to the shop so prep work can be completed in time for our event. If you have ever wanted to solve a switching puzzle, come out next week and do it with real rail equipment!!

– Paul

Photos by Reid Adams and Dwight Maxey