Off again, on again

Frank writes...

Sunday was, well, interesting. And mostly not in a good way. Soon after I woke up I received a call that the museum was closed due to flooding. Union had heavy rain for several hours overnight and several parts of the property including Electric Park, Central Avenue in front of the trolley bus garage, the entire field surrounding the turntable leads, Yard 9, a large area south of the Schroeder Store and west of the steam shop, and the field behind the depot - among others - were under water.

I headed out to IRM as planned anyway, arriving around 1:30. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of cars in the parking lot. The second thing was that the Zephyr was in the depot. Sure enough, a lot of volunteers were working hard to get things up and running. The Track Department had been going around, checking the bridge and track locations on the property that took on water to make sure the tracks were safe to use; the Operating Department managed to get trains in operation out of the depot; the IT department repaired damage to several systems, including the store and diner computer systems, caused by the overnight storms; the DC Line Department was working on repairing damage from one or more lightning strikes; and the Car Department workers managed to get a few trains out and into service, including the Veracruz open cars, which for a while was making trips between the old entrance walkway crossing of the west wye and Jefferson Street. It was quite impressive! Enough people missed the message that we were closed and showed up that there was actually a halfway decent crowd there by early afternoon.

The main line east was cleared for service around 3pm, once the threat to the bridge had abated, and we "officially" reopened and started selling tickets. There was some CA&E train operation but I'll let my father post about that because the above photo, of the Decapod going into service, was the only picture I managed to take the entire day. Oops. But stay tuned, you won't want to miss the rest of the story!