On Saturday, a crew from IRM appeared at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom, Wisc. to pick up the carload of North Shore seats we've been talking about. 
Rod Turner, Frank Sirinek, Mike Stauber, and Gwyn Stupar left early in the morning and drove to Baraboo to get a U-Haul truck.
My wife and I made it a mini-vacation: we drove up on Friday and stayed overnight at the Dells. We then met the others on Saturday morning. (Photos by Margaret Miller.)
Rod Turner, Frank Sirinek, Mike Stauber, and Gwyn Stupar left early in the morning and drove to Baraboo to get a U-Haul truck.
My wife and I made it a mini-vacation: we drove up on Friday and stayed overnight at the Dells. We then met the others on Saturday morning. (Photos by Margaret Miller.)
The seats were already neatly stacked inside the car shop barn, and we had only a short distance to move them.
But they quickly get heavy!
By 11, loading was finished, and the truck headed back to the property to be unloaded by another crew.
Our thanks to Bill Buhrmaster and the others at Mid-Continent who helped make this possible. We're also talking about cooperating on other future projects.
And, of course, our thanks to those who contributed to the seat fund. This will provide us with spare parts for our North Shore fleet for a long time to come.
But they quickly get heavy!
By 11, loading was finished, and the truck headed back to the property to be unloaded by another crew.
Our thanks to Bill Buhrmaster and the others at Mid-Continent who helped make this possible. We're also talking about cooperating on other future projects.
And, of course, our thanks to those who contributed to the seat fund. This will provide us with spare parts for our North Shore fleet for a long time to come.
4 comments:
A Big Thanks to Randy for setting this up with Mid-Continent Railway Museum and going up a day early to get ready! To Frank S. Mike S. Gwyn, & Randy for there help loading and hauling! The unloading at IRM was handled by Greg, Joe, Nick, & Jim West! Also a Thanks to everyone that has made a donation so far and a reminder that we are still way short so keep the $$ coming to the R-763 Fund!!! Thanks to anyone that may have been missed.
One possibly naive possibility is in regard to the holdings of various museums, specifically in regard to spare parts..would a shared database of available spares be useful..? I wonder how much is out there in a back corner of the lot of one that is needed by another..
It would be nice. But at many museums there are loads of spare parts that have never been cataloged, and you would have to organize a crew to dig through a large assortment of heavy parts to see what's there. And with a volunteer workforce, it's hard to get people to go to all this work if there's no immediate, tangible benefit.
So we try to keep in touch with other museums and ask around if we need something. With luck, things work out, as they did in this case.
As Randy said, very tough for many Museums to even know the full extent of parts and other stuff that has been 'saved' over the years. In an ideal situation, there would be a spare parts warehouse where this valuable resource could be sorted, inventoried, and packaged (pallets, racks, etc) for our use or tagged as surplus. There is some progress on this via the ARM who puts out calls for help and specific parts and needs.
Bob Kutella
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