Memorial Day 2018

Memorial Day at IRM went very well, in spite of the above-average temperature.  It was less humid than Saturday and there was a nice breeze.  The other two wood CA&E cars were running, the "Brookins Local".  I don't know of any other place where we could decide to run two other wooden interurban cars just for the sake of variety.  Dan Buck was the motorman, I was the conductor, and Chris Buck was a car host.

And I got out a couple of different cards for the bulkheads.

You ready to punch somebody?  Come to the Boxing Classic instead!  Dan explained that CYO stands for Catholic Youth Organization, and that he had known Bishop Sheil, who died many years ago.   You learn something new every day at IRM.

On Monday the mainline trains consisted of the 1630 coach train, the Zephyr, the three-car IT train, and the Brookins train.  You can hardly do better than that!  I never got a chance to visit the IT cars, because the schedule is such that we were never in the station at the same time.  We operated out of Track 1 all day and never got to 50th Avenue.  The 2200's were running out of 50th to Jefferson and back.  I must say, from my limited perspective, that this was much easier for the crews and went smoother since it involves fewer end-changing and so on.  And for that matter, we got through the whole day without a dewirement!  What more could anyone want?

The Beau Brummel of IRM:

There goes the IT train:

Everybody gets excited when the steam engine goes by: 

Including me.

In other fashion news, well, I guess you have to take what you can get.

And on the whole, things went very smoothly and everybody seemed to be having a great time.