Sunday Report

Frank writes...

I was at the museum earlier than usual Sunday, arriving mid-morning and leaving just after dark. I spent most of the day moving windows. The reason is that the two remaining containers east of Barn 4, shown in this view of the yard (or, I should say, where the yard used to be), need to move to make way for imminent building construction.

Below, you can see a bunch of windows in the back of one of the company pickup trucks. This is about half of one load, and Joel and I took about three loads over to our storage unit, along with a bunch of pressed glass pieces. In this view, the stack on the left are North Shore windows, while on the right are some CA&E 450-series storm windows. These are the only CA&E storm windows of any description I know to be preserved, though Fox River may have some storm windows, I don't know. It's the downside of abandoning service in July, I guess.

During a break in the action, I took my newly painted window over to the 18 and installed it.

After taking the North Shore movable sash, and a car or so's worth of CA&E 450 windows, over to the storage unit, we were left with a whole lot of North Shore storm windows. Below, one of two pallets that I stacked with these as it was starting to get dark. These are easier to stack than the movable sash because they don't have any latches, so they can be stacked "cleanly."

While Joel and I worked on moving windows and glass, Zach ran the 3142, Greg ran the HHR train, and Nick and Mikey did various support tasks like refilling the "snow" on the rotary snowplow, turning on lights, and greasing the streetcar line curves. Meanwhile, Doodlebug Bob instructed new volunteer Jimmy in lathe operation, shown here. We do our best to pass along useful skills like this!

Before leaving, I wandered up to Depot Street. This line, which started at the Station Track 2 boarding platform and stretched all the way to Barn 3, is the line to board the HHR train. That's a lot of people! The event is now completely sold out through next weekend, which is the last weekend for this year.

Below, this photo didn't turn out to show motorman Zach very well due to the shadows, but he's boarding a sizable group of riders at Depot Street who had just gotten off the HHR train. The streetcars seem like they've been very well patronized, as they're usually full when I see them go by.

And finally, thanks to one of our newer volunteers, Stephen, who picked up the donation of historic rail shown below. We aren't sure of the provenance of the center and right pieces, which are UK-style "bullhead" rail and normal American T-rail, respectively, but we did receive paperwork on the piece of "bridge rail" on the left. It was dug up in 1942 by the US Army in the Panama Canal Zone and was left over from the notoriously disastrous 1880s French canal construction effort. What a tremendous find! They even did a metallurgical analysis, and found that the iron was quite low quality - but that, ironically, its high content of impurities also kept it from rusting as badly as better steel would have. These pieces of rail were left with Richard, who is working on assembling an exhibit of old, unusual, and significant pieces of rail.