Building Excitement

 So many things are going on, it's hard to know what to show first.  The contractors are making good progress on the Barn 4 extension.

And part of the old barn has been resided, as seen here:

And excitement is building in other ways.  Buzz showed us some of the vinyl masks he has made for the 1702 and the 306.   These are astounding.

Fred was working all day on cleaning up and assembling one of the controllers for the 306.  The other one was done by Carl Illwitzer -- about thirty years ago.  But it will be put to good use soon.

Many other people from the Car Dept. (and the other departments!) were hard at work on various projects.  And it's always nice to meet some of our blog readers.

I remounted the other step on the 308.  This is not easy to do as a one-man job, but with a sufficient knowledge of physics it can be done.

And after that, I put the four-car wood train back together and made a brief test run out to the road and back.

The whistle valve on the 308 needs to be reseated, but that should not be hard.  Since no coaches from the CA&E were preserved, this is about the only opportunity to run a train from a car that isn't weighed down with non-functional machines.

And the special event for today was the Shay Take the Throttle experience.  Each of the participants got to operate the Shay from the west wye down to Jefferson and back.  We had plenty of participants, and a good time was had by all.  I'm sure they all got good and dirty.

And here's part of the crew taking a well-deserved break.  I should have written these guys' names down, but I'm never prepared.  As you might have noticed.

This event will be continuing on Sunday, by the way.

The 1630 was pulling the coach train, but I didn't get a picture.  Due to the Shay using the west end, main-line trains operated to the east in and out of the station.

And then we had the 4000's in service.  I don't have to write these names down: I've known Dan and Chris Buck since the seventies.

So excitement is building for all the special events coming up in the next few weeks.  Don't miss it!