Cleanup in Yard 4

Frank writes...

Sunday afternoon was all about yard cleanup, at least for me. When I arrived, the Track Department was hard at work taking apart the track that was vacated just yesterday. In this photo, Marcus and Fred Z. are in the right foreground working on Track 43, while in the background over on Track 41 you can see Joel, new volunteer Jimmy, Good Nick, and Zach on the L4, all of whom were working on putting crater grease in the 1754's gear pans and pulling the truck back and forth to distribute it. I didn't get any photos, but Bill was also working on making waste bundles to serve as dust covers in the 1754's axle cap bearings. This truck is getting very close to being put under the 1754.

Here's what Yard 4 East looks like without a single car on tracks 42 (which is currently missing) or 43:

Weird! That's Marcus, Fred, and Bob over on the right, with Joel on the left. There was still some stuff scattered along the north side of track 43 that we needed to move, plus a giant stack of gear pans at the east end of track 43 that needs to get moved at some point soon, so I mostly helped with cleaning up this stuff.

Here's a question: what are these three things? They're steel and painted yellow.

One side project was building a "corduroy road" out of ties so that we can put gear pans on it. This was set up in the parts storage area along the south side of Bruneau Drive, near the east end. Nathan ran the Bobcat to set this up (and was also using the Bobcat all afternoon to relocate a lot of the miscellaneous stuff left along track 43). Jeron and Jimmy also worked on this.

It's been a very, very long time since the below view of Barns 3 and 4 was possible. It's also been several years since we had all three doors at the east end of Barn 4 open.

Here's Bob using a torch to cut some bolts near the east end of track 43 that were frozen, thanks to having been buried in the dirt that formed a "crosswalk" for a couple of decades.

My father's description of track 43's condition as "almost comically wretched" is about perfect. Many of the ties had basically disintegrated underneath the rail. All of this will get re-graded in the near future, then the track will be replaced once our contractor finishes with the work they're doing to replace rail on the main line.

And a final photo for the day, showing roughly the same view as the second photo in this post, but with all of the remaining stuff removed from between tracks 42 and 43. The steel thing in the foreground is the bucket for the Bobcat. Next up: clearing out the strip between Bruneau Drive and track 43. That ought to be... interesting.