West's Folly

Work on the EBT cars was a casualty of a whole bunch of things. Some would probably call them West's Folly, but my guess is they are still the best way to go. Basically, we need to be able to move ballast more efficiently, none of the historic DRGW cars are up to it. One EBT car is reasonably close to being finished. Getting a huck machine has been an expensive challenge, I had originally assumed we could weld the patches. Right now we're working on getting a Class I to lend us a huck machine. We're going to start dumping ballast with the two ex-standard gauge cars, and hopefully one EBT can join them soon. It will be inefficient, but we need to start anchoring the track...too many center bound ties and too many kinks. Hopefully this winter the shop will be able to make more progress. The idea of volunteers doing this work is probably good, so long as we have folks who have some experience in steel car repair....it is much different than working on our mostly wooden historic fleet. But we need four or five roadable cars to do the ballast work efficiently.