Moving Along

Frank writes...

There's plenty of activity happening at IRM these days, but more about that later. Suffice to say that it's a high priority to clear the "stuff" from between Yard 4 East and Bruneau Drive. On Saturday, the Track Department was busy pulling out the remnants of track 43, but there are still a lot of car parts to get out of the way before the entire yard can be re-graded and then new track laid.

There weren't a lot of volunteers out on Sunday, but I'd say we made good progress anyway. Here we see Nick, Greg, and Richard taking a break from loading spare grid boxes onto pallets.

And here's the final result. All of the grid boxes were loaded onto pallets and deposited in the car shop parking lot. We tried moving them over to the storage pad on the south side of Bruneau Drive, but the small solid-tire forklift shown behind, which was our only motive power for the day, couldn't make it through the grass and had to get towed out by Bob Olson.

After that, Greg departed to help Bob break bonds on rail out on the main line - our track contractor has begun the big rail replacement project, which will see about a mile of the main line fitted with 115# rail in good condition - while Nick and I spent a while loading about 45 gear pan halves onto more pallets. The forklift chose this point to break down, but the pallets are arranged along the road ready to be relocated. This is maybe a third of the total gear pan collection that has been living at the east end of track 43. While we were doing this, Steve Iversen was also buzzing around relocating parts from one of the containers east of the shop that will have to be moved.

So, back to all of the progress. Besides the impending grading of Yard 4 and the work on the main line, down at the south end of the property, the earth moving company is getting close to finished with grading for Barn 12 and Yard 16. Included with this is also an extension to the north-south access road along the east ends of Barns 11, 13, and 14, so that road now reaches at least to the streetcar line extension. Nick and I swung by to see the progress on one of our golf cart trips to fetch pallets, and it's quite impressive. If you're having trouble visualizing what all is going on, hopefully this helps. Areas being graded flat are marked with red rectangles, green indicates the newly built access road, and yellow is the car line extension (which has been there for a few years).