On Saturday, May 11, volunteers Dwight Maxey, Colin Mellin, Kendall Crouch, Bruce Davis, Chris Pollard, Gary Carter, Reid Adams and Paul Brown dodged rain showers while first working to clean up our caboose fleet to get them ready for next week’s train ride event. Kendall and Reid took on the bulk of work sweeping, vacuuming, wiping down surfaces, and even mopping the floors. Meanwhile, Bruce and Chris started working on the Hi-Rail truck to try to finish removing rear wheels and to remove a hydraulic cylinder from the knuckle boom crane on the rear of the truck. This has been an ongoing battle with rusted lugs and bolts. One end of the crane cylinder was easy work, but the other end had bolts that just weren’t budging, so while those were soaked with penetrating oil, the gang turned to the wheel lugs.

Chris had an idea to weld an old lug nut to the stuck stud, and that’s when Gary showed up with his welder to help out. With help from the whole crew, and a bit of struggling, those stubborn lug nuts finally came loose and were removed. Now we can get the tires repaired and remounted on the truck so we can use it. Then we spent a little more time working on the crane cylinder and were able to get the two bolts out so the cylinder can now be taken to shop and repaired. We finished this work just as the rain started to come down steady.

The volunteers were also able to walk the track around the sharp curve leading into the shop area, to scope out a possible future project. Stay tuned for that one! All in all, a great day with a wide variety of work and a couple of successes in moving a couple of projects forward.

Here are a few photos of today’s work.

– Paul