The air compressor is toast. But it does run. However, it would probably need a lot of work down the road as it is pretty worn out.
An old "drover" caboose being restored. I still need to find out the heritage on this one. Probably Cotton Belt. Found a photo of one at the Cotton Belt Museum in Tyler, Texas that looks a lot like it.
Sounds like a sales pitch from someone in a dark alley wearing a trench coat... Wanna buy a cheap locomotive? Very tempting but with the price of diesel these days, I'd need the national budget of Grand Fenwick to just start it! It would look good in my driveway though...
Looks like a match! Has newer style trucks on it though. Any markings under the frame? Usually has a stencil of original owner and number.
Back at the ASTA yard. Looking along a flat car at the old Santa Fe Caboose. Our ex SP dining car that we are restoring is to the right of the caboose with the portable stairway going up to the end door as it has no vestibule steps. The flat car was used last year to hold a portable generator to provide HEP (head end power) to many of the excursion cars. Normally they use a big honking generator hung under one of the excursion cars to provide HEP but the diesel unit on it was being rebuilt. The first cars on the excursion train have their own generator sets so don't require HEP. One of our cars, the New Braunfels is usually first behind the locomotive. Next in line is the Buckeye Trail. It was painted in Milwaukee Road colors by the group that runs the Milwaukee 4-8-4 261. It was orginally built for the New York, Chicago and St. Louis (Nickel Plate) Railroad. Plans are to repaint it to its original paint scheme. Next is the Buckeye Lake. Same story on the Milwaukee paint scheme. Built in 1949 for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and will be restored to that paint scheme in the future. Another car with its own power is the ex Denver & Rio Grande, California Zephyr chair car Silver Pine.
Oh, there is a lot of skudzy looking stuff tucked away in various places. This poor Pennsy coach got scrunched many years ago. Now without trucks, it sits against the fence full of junk. There are a bunch of old tank cars, hoppers and caboose about. Here are a sample. Way in back beyond the scaffolding is another of our cars sitting on a flat car. Here it is before it left Houston for Cedar Park. We still had to do some work on the flat car to bring it up to interchange specs before UP would accept it. As soon as we rebuilt its trucks and get it mounted on them, we will start working on it in earnest.
And then there is this project. The boiler has been totally rebuilt, a new steam cylinder saddle has been cast and machined and new bearings for all the wheels are ready to go. Just takes time and lots of $$$$$$$$. Hopefully, this is what it will look like again some day.
Gotta say that the Hampton Inn in the background is different, with its bowed walls. Almost looks like a building from a children's story book or a normal structure photographed with a 20mm wide-angle lens. Very creative, never seen anything like it.
Just the camera on my I-phone. Didn't have my Nikon on me as I was floating about in my hot air balloon.
The way it's photographed, it does look like something out of a cartoon. That's what happens when you're messing around with balloons...