A Pleasant Afternoon

Sunday afternoon was cold, rainy, and dreary, so for a change, our usual ride in the country brought my wife and me out to IRM to see some of the projects going on.  And for something useful to do, we cleaned up the 319, washing all the windows inside and out, and so on.

I also worked on one of the whistle valves on the 308; this will take a little more effort.  

And then we wandered over to Barn 4.  Tim is on top of the lift, prying loads of nails and tacks from the roof of the 1754.  As was mentioned in the comments, they fixed the control problem, so the car can now move under its own power.  So far, though, it's only moved a few feet.

Jeff, Norm, and Joe are working on the Michigan car, as usual:

Then we stepped into the Electroliner.  Here we talked to Ed Oslowski, and met Josh Sutherland.  He's skinny and agile enough to get wedged into the front of the motorman's compartment, and get himself out again, so he's working on this area, as you may be able to see here.  That's Ed's arm on the left.

So that was fun, but we're not going to make a habit of it.  I don't want to press my luck.

Meanwhile, at home I started looking through the Scalzo file on the Rock Island Southern.  This file has much more information than there was for the CIT.  In particular, there are these huge maps, which he made by taping together numerous smaller copies of topo maps.  There are two copies, one of which has the railroad line marked in red.  Here they are, laid out on the living room floor:

I'm not sure how I can make use of these.  The distance from Rock Island to Monmouth is over three feet.  Perhaps the idea was that if a book were published, it would include a large folding map, as is sometimes done.  But for an online article, these will be hard to present in a useable manner.  I guess they will just be preserved for future reference.  This article will take longer to finish, but it will be worth the wait.