Thomas Time

Frank writes...

I was able to make it out to IRM on Sunday for the second day of the first weekend of the museum's Day Out With Thomas event. Weather reports predicting thunderstorms (which never materialized) seemed to have only a slight effect on the crowd, as the museum was pretty busy until mid-afternoon.

Operations went pretty much the same as in 2017, with the Thomas train boarding on the south turntable lead. There were seven cars in the Thomas train including five Rock coaches, a Lack coach, and the North Western combine. Harold did an excellent job running "Radio Free Thomas" and had a nice photograph present in the broadcast tent of our late friend Al Reinschmidt, who for many years was Harold's co-host on the PA system broadcast.

I was helping out at the entrance, mostly talking to people arriving to make sure they were in the right line and also helping to distribute Happy Holiday Railway brochures to people leaving. The entrance was moved from its old location, at the west trolley bus loop, to a new location across from the Schroeder Store where the museum entrance typically is. The merchandise tent is shown; with less merchandise being sold in recent years, entrants lined up under one side of the tent, which was good because it kept people waiting in line out of the sun. This was late in the day when things had calmed down but for the morning this area was full of people. Good Nick is on the left, Richard in the white shirt, and Jeron on the right.

Of course there's a huge number of IRM volunteers who take part in the event, some more visible than others. On a quick visit to the office I encountered Roger, here working the phones to answer questions and direct incoming calls.

The "other" power for the Thomas train was the newly-repainted Rock Island GP7R, which as far as I know performed flawlessly. I'm quite certain this turned a few heads!

Other work was being done too. Over in front of the steam shop, the Shay was fired up to set the safeties. There are a few little tasks to do before it's ready for service but nothing to terribly odious from the sounds of it. Apparently Sunday was the first time since 1999 that IRM had two of its own steam engines fired up. Now for the next milestone: to get to the first time since 1999 with two of our own steam engines in operation!

In other news, Jeff was working on some wooden pieces for the frame of the Michigan car; Joel was working on fixing an air leak in the brake stand of the ComEd steeplecab; and Thomas was working on a project to sort out some spare parts, a project which I helped with briefly after I was done with Thomas duties late in the afternoon. I also took some photos of step linkages for the crew working on London County Council 1 at Crich; that car was built with fold-out steps (later replaced with solid steps) and they're looking to backdate it, but virtually no cars in Britain were ever built with this feature so they were interested in some input on how fold-out steps work on our cars. I took a look at the steps under the 972, 3142, 415, and 354, and of course no two cars had even remotely the same linkage arrangements. Sounds about right!