Good Morning Everyone......bright and clear with seasonal cool temperatures. Still have to have the grass mowed. The grass loves the cool weather and morning dew.
Yesterday, I needed to get my INR thickness of the blood) checked at the local hospital. The blood testing is done by a trained Pharmacist and while there she gave me a Flu shot. My INR hasn't been regulated lately and we discovered that my wife was giving me a full tablet on a certain day rather than a half. Just enough to upset the blood system. Now we're back normal in the pill dosage.
In-spite of the virus I made reservations for a Thanksgiving dinner at the restaurant where we had our wedding reception over 45 years ago. It over looks a Big Cedar Lake and they did a great job on the entire reception. Everything worked out without problems with the open bar, dinner and band. Speaking of the band....it was a group of 20 + high school Band Directors and professional musicians that grouped together for weddings and played every type of music from Big Band to Rock 'n Roll. The dinner was a family style sit down dining affair with ham and beef which was $3.95 a plate!!! It will be fun to go back in history if only for a few moments. Pictures of the hall on their web site show that nothing other than the tables as changed over the years.
Talk about the low prices for the dinner at the wedding, look at the automoble prices in the Ad Section from the Milwaukee Journal in 1936.
We'll take precautions with wearing our masks when not eating and avoiding direct contact with others. After being cooped up in the house since March 1st, a nice dinner will fit the bill to relieve the strain places on those who are house bound.
Not much on the railroad front and I think not really working on the layout is that the blood thickness and is running me down. In exchange for not working on the railroad I'm doing a lot of arm chair computer railroading. It run to watch railroading videos on the computer. It will be a long winter and the things I want to do on the railroad and related items can be on a "To Do List" and completed when its below zero outside.
cv_acr: Interesting in your post about the mill's locomotives needing boiler maintenance one a year. A the facility where I would we had a Central Plant with three 600 hp Cleaver Brooks low pressure boilers. Each boiler had 286 boiler tubes, each 16 feet long which required attention every spring or early summer. A boiler tear down would last two to three weeks for each boiler. No expense was spared when it came to the boilers. A boiler failure in the winter would mean reduced heating for over a million square feet of retail space and two hundred thousand square feet of office space with much of the office space being medical. During extreme cold weather two boilers would operate and the third warm up and on stand by status.
McLeod: Great photos of those SD40 locomotives. They look like something I would weather!!! More of a fading job than adding rust. I like the spray painted "F" and "R" on the front and rear of #5242. I'll need to remember that touch for one of my weathering jobs.
TLOC: Your weather reports makes me glad I drained the water at the cabin. No need for frozen pipes.
The Commissioner of Baseball estimated that the virus cost this year major league baseball over 8 Billion dollars from lenders and at least 3 Billion dollars in operational costs from the virus. I hope the players and owners are taking a pay cut!!!
Yesterday, we drove to North Lake, Wisconsin where the former North Lake tourism train used to run on the former "Bug Line" from North Lake to just outside Merton, Wisconsin. It was sad to find the terminal gone and a new multi-use building in its place. A rundown passenger car sat in the weeds hidden partially by trees and other growth. I used to love that old oil burning steamer when it pulled the odd assortment of cars filled with people down the trains.
I have a commemorative coffee mug from the railroad and a penny flatted after I put it on the tracks and the locomotive ran over it.
That's all for now.....
Later.
Greg
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