Weekend Report: Facing the challenges of ice!

Our volunteers continue to be very busy on weekends both operating the museum but also in tackling the many tasks involved with our restoration efforts.  Here are summary reports on the efforts undertaken on this particular weekend.

Saturday, January 11^th, 2014

Around 11:00 a.m. this morning, we began to free up Whitcomb locomotive #1 which was iced in on  patio track 6. Together we cleared enough track to get #1 onto the turntable behind 6213 in preparation for equipment moves on Sunday. Ice chipping was a major item for much of the day as our volunteers cleared a path for the public to enter the museum and later moved on to clearing the rail head of track #34 in order to move #6213 there on Sunday to allow us to turn the Cape Race passenger car end for end.  The only thing that made any of this possible was the +6 C high temperature of the day with light rain that made the ice mostly soft and “punky”.  In places it was a full inch (2.54 cm) thick and very hard to move before the day warmed up.

In the mini-depot. Maintenance work continued on the Sweet Creek miniature steam locomotive. We have embarked on a significant re-fitting of the oil burner steam and oil pipework and valves along with replacement of life-expired items like the boiler water gauge and some changes to the injector water feeds and delivery check valves. 

Sunday, January 12^th, 2014

The park was quite literally a skating rink Sunday morning,. The Saturday melt water had refrozen overnight into a hockey-worthy surface. Despite this the park saw quite a number of visitors doing the Canadian ice-shuffle walk to avoid falling!

At 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, we fired up our Whitcomb #1 switcher, swung the turntable to track #34 and gave our massive steam engine, #6213, a push. It moved fine but we stalled on slippery rail as the lead driving wheels met the turntable gap. A few minutes  of backing back and forth suggested we were not going anywhere in the slippery conditions but the addition of a little sand to the rails changed the picture dramatically and off we went. After that it was a straightforward sequence of moves to shift the boxcar out of the way and turn the Cape Race passenger car in stall 15 and then return #6213 to the turntable. We were done at noon. 

The whole move would have been out of the question without the ice-chopping effort on Saturday to clear the rails. Our thanks again to all of the volunteers who were  involved in that effort.

On the weekend we also saw further paint work undertaken on windows. The Lego layout in stall 17 also saw some work as well. It runs for the kids five days a week and needs periodic cleaning.  Work also continued on general cleanup to prepare our space for our annual TRHA Christmas party.

Posting by Michael Guy; Pictures by Lance Gleich, Michael Guy and Russ Milland

Click on each image for a closer look!