Day Out With Thomas 2021

Frank writes...

On Sunday I spent much of the day helping at the main entrance. As was the case in 2019, John Naglich Jr ran the ticket sales and ticket printing operation, while Richard ran the ticket scanning side of things.

This is what people saw as they entered the museum. Overall things seemed to run quite smoothly; the forecasted all-day rain turned out to be a few brief periods of light showers and the number of attendees has so far outpaced our last Thomas event in 2019. Make sure to tell your friends!

We all hope this sort of signage will be nothing more than an historical curiosity by next year.

The last Thomas trip was at 3pm so at around 3:30 we closed down the entrance. I headed over to the car shop where I got to work. As shown above, I painted a drift card "tile red" for Joel so that our in-house paint mixing department can make me up some canvas paint of this shade. Joel is also going to compare this to what's on the roof of our IT cars, like the 518, because if it's the same shade then he'll have some extra mixed. The roof of the 234, at least, could use a fresh coat.

Then I spent some time measuring, drilling, and cutting out holes with a jigsaw helpfully provided by Joel. And voila, the first of the three "temporary" ceiling panels is now installed in the 18. The two holes shown are for ceiling vents, which fortunately we have. The next big panel will span most of the remaining gap and then I'll cut down my third panel to fill in the last foot or two. This will do just fine until we can raise enough money to procure a panel large enough to fill this entire space.

And now for something completely different - it's back to Van Dorn stuff! Our friend Bill Wulfert emailed me to say that he'd found a CSL trailer-style Van Dorn coupler out along Bruneau Drive. Sure enough, I managed to find it, though it took some searching (I'd overlooked it when I scanned the area a few months ago). It's shown here, with the coupler head at bottom left and the anchor casting at top right. It appears to be basically complete, which is great, because the 9020 is missing its coupler at one end. We also have two spare coupler heads of this same type.

I spent a few minutes looking underneath the 9020 out of curiosity. The east end still has its coupler, though the radius bar (circle iron?) is badly mangled - on one side of the coupler it was torched out and on the other side it was bent up, apparently from the car being lifted by the radius bar. But as near as I can tell, the CSL preferred to haul these cars around using a plain old tow-bar pocket, so most or all of the trailers that were adapted for storage or work service - at least, the ones that stayed on their trucks - had their couplers removed from one end. The west end of the 9020 has lost its coupler, anchor casting, and radius bar, and had a tow-bar pocket casting bolted under the end of the car. But the bolt holes are still there, so it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to replicate this equipment and re-hang the second coupler. It's not exactly high on the priority list though.

Speaking of the CSL, we've got some interesting photos coming soon, so stay tuned!