Moving the 172

It's taken more than a month, but North Shore car 172 has finally arrived at its new home, IRM.  Now that it's ours, we can tell the story of loading it up at Noblesville.  This was done back on October 25-27.  I never did get a picture of the entire crew, but it consisted of project manager Zach Ehlers, Gregg Wolfersheim, Rich Schauer, Nick Day, and myself.  Just getting the car out of the barn was an adventure.  

The first thing you notice is that the barn has three tracks, but there is no exit for the center track.   When an extension was built onto the original storage barn, with a concrete floor, the two outer tracks were extended north, converging towards each other to the doors at the north end.  The two cars stored on the center track were trapped.   Preposterous, but true.

This is how it looked when we arrived.  On the left track is a steam road passenger car, with the North Shore 172 hiding behind it.  But they are blocked from the exit behind us by another car on the center track, partly sitting on the concrete floor.

In an effort to remove the steam road passenger car from the center track, the movers had tried laying some kiddie car rails across the concrete floor.  This is like the track for an amusement park train, only standard gauge.   Guess how well that worked.

The track just snapped apart and the rails started to break. 

Also on the 172's track were two heavy lathes sitting on the rails.  Nice.

On the west track is the one operational locomotive.  Gregg was our expert engineer.

And here at the back of the barn is the 172.  I believe Rich has already started removing underbody parts in preparation for moving.

Zach gets to run the bobcat while Gregg looks on.  However, the lathes proved to be too heavy for the bobcat to move.

Fortunately, our liaison man from the City Park Department came to our rescue with a large front loader.  We must say that everyone from the City of Noblesville that we dealt with was very helpful and professional, and we appreciated their aid in getting our car off their property.

The first step was to push the car on the center track back south, to clear the east track.  As the car moved along, there was a series of loud bangs as the track continued to break apart.  I couldn't stop laughing.  I haven't been back to Noblesville since these pictures were taken at the end of October, so I have no idea how they finally managed to remove this car from the barn, if indeed they did.

As I said, the bobcat was unable to move the heavy lathe:

So here the big front loader is dragging it along the rails, out of the barn.

And now, we're ready to remove the W&LE business car from the east track.

Gregg runs the locomotive out of the barn.

And after clearing a lot of junk out of the way, the W&LE business car sees the light of day for the first time in many years.  We should point out that the "Norfolk and Western" lettering is bogus.

It's a very interesting car in its own right, so while it was outside I took a number of pictures of it.

AOS stands for Age of Steam, but again I have no idea whether it has left Noblesville yet.

But here's our North Shore car at the back of the barn.

And now it's outside for the first time in a long time.  We later removed all of the loose canvas from the roof, working from a ladder.

The inside needs work, to be sure, but is basically complete.

And finally, here's our project manager proudly standing next to his acquisition.

I wasn't able to stay around for the third day and the loading onto the trailer, but the car was then taken to private property near Francesville, where it remained until recently.