Just wanted to let people know that some railroad volunteers were allowed on the property over the weekend to focus on moving the locomotives from their location to a secure area. That work was performed Friday and Saturday which was successful. Late in the day Saturday we were notified we had a week to get all the passenger car parts, frames and other freight cars removed from the car barn area so the focus shifted to there for Sunday and some people took Monday off work to continue working Monday as well. Sunday We managed to get enough stuff moved out of the way in the Car barn area like passenger car trucks and passenger car pieces to be able to gain access to the large equipment. The Keystone Cars played hard to get but we got them out. The fire burned hot enough to melt the brake parts but not hot enough to melt all the way which made things a challenge since it was acting like glue holding everything in place. We won in the end though.

It was noticed Monday that the smaller Keystone Hopper car that was in the back corner of the building reviled a historic surprise to us. The fire burned off the paint that everyone thought was the original paint however it turns out there was one more layer. You can faintly see the original railroad name and some of the original paint. I am not going to say the name here since the person that noticed it has actually been working for a long time on tracing the step by step history of the KeyStone equipment and is very close to finishing that project so you will have to wait for that.

That is all for now. Many photos were taken over the weekend and will be posted on the Swanton Pacific Facebook page once the main photographer can get home, sort, label and then post some photos. I too am not a fan of facebook but it is the easiest way for us to share photos with the public right now. The page is set to not require a log in but that doesn't stop Facebook from popping up in your face every 5 minutes telling you to log in. You can just close that window and continue looking at the page. You do not need to be logged in or have an account to view our stuff.

Here is the reference to an older post here from a few weeks ago. It has all of the links for facebook and the main Calpoly site in it as well as some history and fire information if you missed it.

http://www.altamontpress.com/discussion/read.php?1,221460,221756#msg-221756