My Kingdom For a Truck

A truck, a truck my kingdom for a truck! Okay maybe I am being a little bit dramatic but really a working crane truck would be really helpful around these parts.

Peggy

This is Peggy, she is our hi rail crane truck.  As you can see by the picture, she comes in handy when we need to move platforms, cable, gate mechs so on and so forth.  The problem is that Peggy has hydraulic pump issues.  At the end of the last half we took her in because she was making awful grinding noises when you move the out riggers or crane, and you had to really rev up the rpm's to even get anything to move.  So she went in to the mechanic while we were off.

Sadly, we picked her up and tried to use her with zero success. I couldn't even winch down, literally nothing moved.  So back she went, first to one shop, and then another.  If we don't have her back at the beginning of this half we are going to be up the proverbial creek.

Graffiti

One of the crossings we are working on is right in front of the yard office, so I see the (world famous) Y120 switching and I have noticed that there is a lot of graffiti on the cars that looks pretty new.  So I think we have a graffiti artist in our midst. When I see all of this painting on the sides of cars I always have two thoughts.

First, I always think about how much talent the people that do some of this artwork have.  Most of my artwork consists of stick figure drawings, so anyone that can do any kind of art amazes me, but the intricacies in some of the artwork is really awesome.   The second thing I think is, how long do these cars sit here?  I know there are metrics on car dwell but how long does it take someone to do one of these paintings?  My stick figures don't take me to long, but I can only imagine how long it must take some of these

Off Time

While I was off we headed down to Smith Mountain Lake for a little camping and some fishing, fishing not catching.  The weather was slightly better than forecast but it was still pretty windy and not exactly toasty.  This was my first trip to this lake and we should have probably hired a local guide to steer us to the fish, because we came home empty handed. Still nice to get away for a few days and spend time with hubby.  

When we got back I did manage to get a little bit more work on my table done.  I finished rough sanding all the boards and got the edges ripped so they would sit together.  My 1960's radial arm saw does not have any type of vacuum system so it basically showers you with shavings as you run the boards through.  

My saw, my helmet and the mess it makes

Tonight I will head back to work for another fun filled week on the railroad.  Hopefully we will have a truck and be ready to cut in both of our crossings in Lynchburg by the end of the half.