Track Department

Sunday's gang consisted of myself and Tom Hunter. Jeron Glander joined later in the day. Riding off the success at Four Mile Siding last weekend Tom and I prepped tools and material on the crane, flat and caboose combo and headed East to finish building the siding. We didn't waste any time when we got there pulling the storage cars from the siding and using the crane to connect the last two track panels. I realized we had forgotten lock washers to finish bolting them together but all of the joints have a bolt on each side until we can pop a few more in. After finishing off the second panel an investigation into a low oil pressure issue was found to be a hot engine... A little Too hot. It looks like the water pump has failed or the radiator is severely clogged. But with no coolant flow on the top of the radiator it brought our crane use to a severe halt. With the crane shut down Tom and I moved on to spiking up all the remaining ties in the section we had installed the rail in last week. Using track jacks, air compressor and spiking gun we had one entire side spiked up in no time. Prepacked lunch followed in the 529 and then onto spiking the other side.... After restarting the air compressor, without fail, it sputtered off and wouldn't restart. Upon investigation of this issue we figure a bad fuel pump. Fuel in, no fuel out... How about some hand spiking to ease the frustration? Of course! We spiked up the entire other side by hand just in time for Jeron to arrive with the Ballast Regulator. We set the panels in a rough line and Jeron, who reinstalled the rebuilt hydraulic cylinder earlier in the day, plowed stone from the siding into the new track. Getting late in the day we called up for a 'tow' back to the property not risking an engine failure without coolant..and were grateful to see Joel Ahrendt, Warren Lloyd and Kyle Merkel arrive with the ComEd 4 electric steeplecab to help us back. While waiting, Jeron managed to drag nearly enough stone for a first lift on the new track to the very end of track. The end will need somewhere around 12-18" raise but it's very close to complete as is. The 'in service' trackage was officially extended roughly 80' and the last of it will be extended another 80' once we make a good raise and tamp.

The ComEd 4 towed us back to station track 2 for us to access the crane this coming weekend. Thanks for the help guys!

Next weekend we'll dig into the engine issues and hopefully finally have parts for the 6000 tamper to get it running again too. The signal dept plans on setting the new bungalow at East Johnson but with the Burro O.O.S. we will not be able to help as originally planned.

Adam Robillard