Thomas, le premier dimanche

Frank writes...

The first weekend of Day Out With Thomas has now come and gone. Overall things ran fairly smoothly and, for the most part, largely as they have in recent years. One of the changes was that the Percy train was powered by diesel rather than steam. Crowd sizes were down a bit from the previous year but that seems to be the case at most Thomas events nationwide.

My post for the day was the 3142, shown above at the "Thomas stop" alongside Barn 9 before the fun commenced. The car ran flawlessly all day, making 26 trips in all if memory serves. Thanks to Dennis Matl and Jack Rzepecki who gave me breaks and, in Jack's case, helped put the car away at the end of the day.

As usual, there were four cars on the streetcar line, and due to some revisions to standard operating practices there was much less "bunching" than in the past. Besides the 3142, Bob Opal was running the 415, Jeff Obarek and Frank Sirinek were on the 4391, and Dennis Matl and Randy Allegrezza were on the 144.

I was too busy going in circles during the day to take any photos, but after everything wound down I did a bit of wandering to get some news updates. The multi-purpose building is coming along nicely, as shown, with almost all of the roof in place now.

B&G seems to have set up a "pick-a-brick" display in front of the partially completed building. Judging from the artist's renderings, I believe that all of these will be used on the building because it will be designed to appear as two or three adjoining structures of slightly differing designs.

And the Schroeder Store was very nicely decked out for July.

This is something new, a nice touch I noticed while on the streetcar line. B&G has installed a locomotive bell on a pole next to the Springfield Avenue stop at the south end of the property. There's a rope so that kids of all ages can ring the bell to their heart's content. This strikes me as a good idea, as does its remote location at the south end of the property!

And of course there's progress in the car shop as usual. The 1754 continues to come along. This may have already been mentioned here, but what's that little drain cock right underneath the retriever bracket?

And Thomas Slater showed me all of the work that is being done on CTA 4146, the "Baldy," a project that he has taken on with help from Nick Espevik, Jack, Bill Wulfert, and others. The car's interior is shown above. A lot of this has been stripped and primed, ready for paint. There's also been structural steel replacement in the wall section to the left and the seat frames have been fixed up and are ready to go back in. Additional details, like backdating the exterior door lights, repairing heaters so that the car can be used in cold weather, checking the doors and brakes, and getting the forced-air ventilation system working, are being attended to as well. Only four "Baldy" type cars from the CTA were preserved and this is the only one that is in anything like good condition, so it's a very historic car.