Entries by Tom Hunter

First off - not a single photo was taken this weekend, we were all just too busy.

Saturday was a productive day, Adam was a surprise visitor as he had some things to take care of up north for a day, so he joined Frank and we always can use the added help.  Frank and Adam worked together taking care of joint repairs, marking ties, fixing one of two pull apart, cleaning the ROW and starting the process of switch lube - all from the Santa Fe hyrail truck.  I spent the entire day setting out ties from the big tree to the east end of Johnson, picking up where Jeron left off - the CN gon never arrived of course - we worked until well after dark to get it all done.

Sunday was just Mitch and I doing some machine repairs - we pulled the bottom bearing from the mower side bar, and cleaned it up in the car shop. We found out why the bolts broke - the bearing is worn out and caused the housing to wobble breaking the bolts.  As it is in a trapped hanger, Mitch and I put it all back together without the bolts (that have been broken for years) and fired it up after sitting by Yard 3 all winter - the mower is now back in machine row at Yard 11.  I plan to run it on the ROW some next weekend.  We spent some time in the Industrial Brownhoist crane with the steam shop folks who are making it ready for service for the Barn 23 track project.  We got a plan together for changing out some grease fittings and will get that one ready in the next few weekends as well.

Over the next week Jeron will get the 4 inch long sweep exhaust 90 deg bend for the 50 and we can get that installed - as the CN gon was a no show on Sunday too... soon enough we need to be ready to unload it.

A productive weekend for sure -

Be Safe out there

Tom

Long Days and tons of work done... well how about one long day and a day to watch thunderstorms and do some flat car planning...

This weekend we continued where Adam and Jeron had left off the week before, we set up the crane train and set off the last of the tie bundles.  It was a long day of hard work - and we were joined by more new folks - and Patrick who it appears that we did not scare off (yet).  We were also joined by Mike Potter - it was good to see him out for a day, and good to have him along to make the cuts and couple back up every time we have to set off a bundle close to the crane - as you cannot raise the boom under the wire - For the gang we had Adam for his last day of spring break, Frank, New guy Bill and Patrick - we also had Greg from the electric car join us and of course Mike Potter.  At the end of the day Steve joined us as a ground man fresh from the new CP UTU rank.

While the gang unloaded the ties between Johnson and the Farm Crossing - Adam spent the day spotting the ties where marked - about 400 of them.  We have about 300 more to spot.  Frank started marking the rest of the bad wood - and Jeron will dig into the tie crane to spot the rest this week.  We hope to get the tie gang out in a month or less to get this done - then we have all the mess of the old ties to pick back up. As soon as we had the last ties off the car, we took a bit of time to set some signal heads with the crane while we were out at Johnson - have to use all the equipment as much as we can for each other.

We worked so hard that we did not take any lunch time until after 3P - as we wanted to get all the ties out and give the railroad to the electric car department to train on the CA&E trains.  After lunch we set the TTX car back on the interchange and a few of us finished the day off with some scrap loading into the gon with the mag to pick up some more of the scrap around the place.

Sunday tuned out to be really rainy with thunderstorms - as we had so much under our belts by then, Frank - Jeron and I just spent some time talking the rest of the summer plans watching the show from Barn 2 -

Next weekend the inbound CN OTM car unloading will be the show (if it is here).

Be Safe out there

Tom