Click on each picture for a closer look!
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We had a great turnout of TRHA volunteers yesterday. It was pretty hot and sunny outside but everyone worked hard from 8:00 a.m. right through to 3:30 p.m. so a lot was accomplished. In the picture at the left above, we see some of the crew respendent in our new saftey vests in front of #6213.
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We began the day by shifting the yellow work platform for the restoration contractors who have now started blast cleaning the wood inside stall 16 as shown in the picture in middle above.
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The team then moved to our highest priority initiative at the moment, track construction, which took the rest of the day. It is a substantial job to lay track using 10 pound per yard rail. There is a learning curve involved in bending such heavy rail around a curve as shown in the picture at the left below! But we did make good progress today. We were also able to ballast yesterday’s track work as shown in the middle picture below. The track is starting to looks very attractive!
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In the right hand picture below, we find an unusual and very heavy track mintenance car which uses pendulums to detect track that is not level and to set grades. This car was kindly lent to the THRA by the Golden Horseshoe Live Steamers in Hamilton, Ontario.
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The technicalities of crossing standard-gauge 100 pound per yard mainline track with 7-1/4″ gauge 10 pound per yard track were solved this week in a nice solid and inexpensive way as reported in an earlier news post. The fact remains that it takes time to build such a crossing and we have nine to do! But thanks to having also climbed the learning curve here, it is just cut-and-weld from here on so progress will be much faster.
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The Sweet Creek locomotive piping was reassembled this afternoon and we ended the day by lifting the locomotive and tender off the assembly stand ready for transport. Today (Sunday) we loaded up the Sweet Creek on a pair of trailers and took it to the Golden Horseshoe Live Steamers miniature railway track in Hamilton to run our first trial runs so that we can confidence that we are ready to operate once our trackwork is complete at the Roundhouse. More pictures and video will be posted tomorrow of this milestone event.
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Posting by Michael Guy; Pictures by James Rasor
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