Update July 6 2008

Great weather for the July 4th weekend, lots of trolley and interurban partying for the parade and the CAE dedication, so we will give the Hicks’ take proper credit for another milestone in their efforts

On the passenger front, we finally got the cars in Barn 3 rearranged to allow a walk through display in the 33 track, and for the first time in 3 years, Galt House is open for visits. We will review this week when Mike gets back, but for now its open weekends as part of the three car set; lounge/diner/combine.

Galt House interior is gorgeous thanks the all the work Shelly put in, carpets shampooed and floors waxed.

 http://www.irm.org/gallery/LN2726

Jack continues to plug along on the B&M cafe, now has tables set as he begins to work the woodwork in the coach area. Every time we look, its more and more along. Great!

Andy has begun the metalwork on the second side of the IC cafe, and seems to think its not as bad as the first one, so who knows? maybe sooner we can see this car moving forward too.

 Outside we still wait for electricity, so we are using more generators to simply power up Air conditioning in places, but the RDC is less purple and more silver. A neat item we discovered this week is lettering is starting to appear under the paint. Not etched, but black letters.  From what we have found so far, it may be Chesapeake and Ohio lettering, in which case we will photograph it and make it go away. I freely admit that we honor the work done in Boston in MBTA but this is CHICAGO and the car is CNW heritage, so it will have to be silver when we are done.

In addition we finally found some reference material (thanks Barb Lanphier) and can pretty much confirm the car is really 9934 not 9933 as suggested. The original notes we got when we began the work in May named the car both ways, so it was a bit confusing, but now we will trust the latest info.

http://www.irm.org/gallery/CNW9934

next week is diesel weekend, so we expect to be busy with guests, but as always feel free to stop by and say “hi” and also dont hesitate to donate to your favorite passenger car early and often.