FIRST WORK SESSION OF 2022
Finally!!! the snow left us long enough for us to get in a very quickly prepared Work Session last weekend, April 23rd-24th…. but as I am writing this, snow is again falling… ever so lightly, but it is in the air… and the temps are back in the low 30’s. We knew we wouldn’t have a huge turnout simply because there wasn’t enough time for many of our volunteers to plan for it… AND… it was such a gorgeous day that many others were busy with yard cleanup and all of the accumulated Honey-Do’s on the perpetual list… understood!!!
We did have several of our Stalwarts make it to Corry for the couple of days, and for that we are grateful… Thanks to Grady, Steve and Bill for making the long treks… joining Norm, Tom and me in pulling more stuff apart and continuing with the creating and dimensioning of the new drawings. We certainly enjoyed their company and efforts… and managed to get quite a bit done. Thanks to Sandy and Ginny for keeping us all fed… “Job well done, Ladies!”
Steve sweeping up the rust and dirt after disassembling the arch-bar components.
The Trucks are now completely apart…. a bolt inventory and count for the Trucks has been taken, and now we are ready to begin cleaning those parts and repairing a couple of them that need some attention…. talk about rust and dirt… WOW… were those pieces stuck tight!!! A lot of pneumatic needle-scaling was done this weekend, the result being that all of those pieces are now ready for some serious grease and crud cleaning and sand blasting in preparation for a final inspection followed by primer and paint. Still more work to go, but it won’t be too long before the trucks begin going back together.
Bill was busy on the lap-top adding more dimensions, and between the two of us we managed to make some headway in some of the wooden parts identification… some of Keith’s notes are visible on some of the pieces and others have his business cards rolled up and stuck in holes with further identification… then there were the pieces with no ID… it all comes down to good old logic, looking at some old photos when available, and a process of elimination…. slowly but surely we will get the picture of how it went together back in the day.
We picked up a vacuum for our sand blast cabinet, and managed to get all of the nuts and bolts in place, putting together the cabinet…. a bit more plumbing and procure a stock of sand and media and the Sand Blast cabinet for small parts will be ready to use.
tank sitting behind.
WORK SESSIONS:
We DO HAVE A DATE set for our next Work Session, and that will be on Saturday and Sunday morning, May 7th-8th. Continuing with cleaning, inspection and parts identification and sorting will be one of the tasks. Building of more Sawhorses will be happening as well. If our electrician is able to make it that weekend we will be continuing to extend our service lines in the building.
OPEN HOUSE:
We are always looking for more and new volunteers for Work Sessions… and we will need more volunteers to help out at our upcoming Open House… which will be on June 11th. Volunteers and relief-volunteers are needed for Information tables, signing in folks coming in the gate, selling memorabilia and tickets for raffles, and etcetera. So, drop me a note at corryrails@gmail.com to my attention… I’m Carl. Last year was a huge success but we didn’t have any extra volunteers… just barely enough… we all worked the whole day straight through… having twice as many volunteers would be wonderful… you don’t need to be an expert on any of this stuff… there is always someone around who can answer the tough questions. This year the Open House will be on the same Saturday as Corry-Fest (June 11th) which brings a lot of people home to Corry… It’s also Alumni Weekend… but there hasn’t been one for the last two years… so the town should be packed. There are a lot of folks who haven’t seen our project yet. We are also taking names of displayers and vendors for that Saturday.
Stay Tuned… and See you soon…