Weekend Report: A busy Saturday in wintry conditions!
Click on each image for a closer look!.
We had a great turn out of people today (Saturday) If I try and list everyone I will certainly miss someone so I won't but would like to welcome a new volunteer, Dan, and thank all of our volunteers for coming out.
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It was certainly a mixed bag of projects and results and gold stars to everyone for sticking it out all day. Briefly it went like this:
- Our "indoor team" made great progress on setting up a new office and lunch corner
- We tried to start locomotive #1
- We unpacked a second batch of new tools from Home Depot.
- We cleared paths through the snow for our planned equipment moves
- We tackled replacing the brasses in our flat car to make it movable
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Meanwhile another crew were wading through a foot of snow with shovels and a snow-blower generously lent to us by Steam Whistle Brewery. In anticipation that we would be able to move equipment at some point they cleared paths across the patio, much of track 40 and over to the flat car on track 34. Well done chaps, it was a lot of work.
The flat car crew's job was to install the eight "new" bearing brasses in the truck journals. This was a mechanically uncooperative fight that went on all day. Some of the journal boxes were contaminated with water which was frozen (naturally) making life difficult as the journal oil packs were solid instead of soft and pliable. To cut a long story short, it took nearly six hours to install four of the eight bearings.
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#1's battery charger will be working all night so after lunch tomorrow (Sunday) we are going to try again to get it started and hopefully make the equipment moves we had planned for today.
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Once again, thank you all, it was a challenging day but enjoyable too if you don't mind lying in the snow under old railway cars!
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Thanks also to Dave Wetherald for a handsome donation of even more new tools.
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Posting by Michael Guy; Pictures by James Rasor
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