Entries by Robert Kutella

I am going to post this entry under the GENERAL category since a lot of subjects are covered.

Smooth

The Depot Street paving is done, ON SCHEDULE!  The Buildings and Grounds crew, led by Dave Diamond, and the many volunteers who contributed and worked on this complex project deserve a lot of credit.  Throughout the day visitors enjoyed the new surface and the B&G crew added finishing touches including dressing the shoulders.

New Loop

As part of the same paving contract as Depot Street, the paving for the new trolley bus loop was completed.  Here, John Myhre is looking at the old overhead turning wye while you can see the paving in the background.

Where It Began

The Indiana Railroad 65 was the first car acquired at the founding of IRM.  Dan Fenlaciki looks sharp in the motorman's seat, as the car made a rare appearance for some service trips for the public.

Tail Hose

Rich Witt has become a very dedicated and productive member of the wood shop crew.  His other passion is Operations and he is hooking up a tail hose brake valve on the passenger train.  This is a connection to the train line air pipe to allow a crew member on the rear platform to stop the train from that position during a back up move.

Tack Molding

Speaking of the wood shop, Tim Peters is making new tack molding for CRT 1797.  He has set up a unique system of fences and guides and machined the last profile on some long ten foot boards, BY HIMSELF.

The Next Door

The heat outdoors was brutal and in the afternoon, Victor Humphreys and I were going to proceed to the next steps on a new door.  We got sidetracked when Tom Schneider came by for a visit.  He is steadily improving healthwise and is no longer needing to wear the suitcase monitor for his heart.  It was very good news to see him up and about looking so chipper and with a good attitude.

I am going to close this entry here and add another covering work on our B&O wagon top boxcar.  This is an ongoing major restoration project so I have opened a new sub category under the main Freight Car Department category.  If you are not taking advantage of all the various software options on the IRM BLOGS, here are a few tips.  On the right hand side there is a CATEGORY TREE.  If there is a plus sign in the little square box for each topic you may click on that to expand the category topics.  Clicking on any category will filter other entries and allow you to read updates, in order, for that single topic.

For any blog entry, the images are thumbnails.  Clicking on the thumbnail will expand the image and you may scroll forward and back for any of the images in a single entry.  AND - at that point, if you go to the upper left corner of the expanded image you will see a small square icon pop up and clicking on that gives a full size blowup of the single image.  WOW!

We are all hungry for Steam News so here is an UNOFFICIAL report sent to me for posting here, by Jim Opolony, one of the worker bees out in steam land.  Thank you, Jim.

"On June 25, the steam shop members learned how to remove rivets from the 1630's fire box.  Rivet heads were ground off inside the firebox.  Since we had never done this before, we had to decide which riveting gun would be the best to pound out the rivets.  Like always, we started slowly and used the smallest rivet gun.  We discovered that if we drilled out the center of the rivet, it made it possible for the rivet to collapse and hopefully come out a little easier. We also moved up to the largest rivet gun to get the rivets out faster.  We constantly added penetrating oil and pounded the rivets, with a small sledgehammer, back into the sheet so that they would come out faster.  We managed to remove two rivets.  Since a number of members were involved in the fund raiser on Saturday night, we stopped work relatively early.  Only four workers can do this job, so some shop members did other work.
 
Two members worked on 'truing up' one of the driving rods for the 428.  Glenn Parkhurst worked on the Bay City crane's engine."