Jun 28, 2021
579 (and rsd-5 #574) sit in Minneapolis on a fall day in 1975. I’m not exactly sure where in Minneapolis they are, but I’m making the wild ass guess that they’re somewhere around the wye that joins the short line to the line along Hiawatha Avenue.
—orc Mon Jun 28 23:53:06 2021
Jun 27, 2021
Moving 50 boxes of books (plus a dozen boxes of keepsakes) into a storage unit (plus moving a whole shitload of furniture to goodwill, then moving a big wooden table & some odds & ends to my mother’s new apartment) on a day when the temperature topped out at 112°F was, um, a new and exciting experience. If, g-d forbid, my sweetie predeceases me I’m going to edit my will to say “take a match and throw it into the house; you’ll be glad you did.”
If anyone wants a Kimball console piano and can pick it up before wednesday, sing out; we didn’t have nearly enough puff to get this almost-exactly-the-size-of-an-elevator piano out of the apartment, and definitely didn’t have enough puff to pull a 300+ pound chunk of wood and steel up the porch stairs into our house.
—orc Sun Jun 27 23:51:17 2021
Jun 25, 2021
Two of the neighborhood chickens take their afternoon constitutional along 17th Ave.
—orc Fri Jun 25 22:36:43 2021
Dust Mite has a cunning plan to avoid roasting in the uncomfortable hot weather that’s afflicting us this weekend. Hopefully the plan won’t encounter a power failure, because we don’t have a backup power supply (except for the batteries on the laptops, which isn’t enough to run an air conditioner for more than about 15 seconds.)
—orc Fri Jun 25 22:30:17 2021
Jun 22, 2021
A couple of bipolars pull a passenger train through Auburn, Wa in 1952.
—orc Tue Jun 22 22:56:44 2021
Jun 20, 2021
There will come a day when they pry my cold dead hands off the scanner and I can no longer post scans of the Milwaukee’s 4 rsc2m roadswitchers, but that day is not today. (The day in the photo was April 8, 1972, about a year before I discovered the Milwaukee Road’s roundhouse – and 576-579 – on the north side of La Crosse and started obsessively watching them until they were all pulled out of service and sent away for scrap.)
—orc Sun Jun 20 01:31:02 2021
Jun 18, 2021
Dust Mite found some leftover holiday gift cards
—orc Fri Jun 18 23:05:03 2021
Rock Island #621 (the second to last surviving DL109, and the one that had the most interesting modifications done to a DL109) sits in Memphis on a sunny December day in 1965, still in good condition for a unit that only had a couple of years left on the clock.
—orc Fri Jun 18 00:05:07 2021
Jun 13, 2021
Cold day, but warm laundry
—orc Sun Jun 13 20:45:08 2021
Jun 11, 2021
Dust Mite inventories a box of tools I salvaged when cleaning out my parents’s old apartment.
—orc Fri Jun 11 23:53:44 2021
576 sits, in the twilight of its career, in North La Crosse, next to one of the SDL39s that finally swept the rsc2m’s off the light branch lines where they roamed.
—orc Fri Jun 11 20:24:46 2021
Jun 10, 2021
I’m getting the itch to make another frameset, in the through axle road 650b format. So of course I had to mock up a couple of variant frames (traditional triple triangle flat-topped & a heavily sloped TT w/ a vestigial triple triangle) which I will sit and think about for a few weeks until I gather all of the tubes I need to make up a frame. The keel (HT/DT/CS & at least the lower half of the ST) will be the same either way, so in the worst case I can make that part up and then dry-fit the TT & SS’s against it for a last-minute decision.
—orc Thu Jun 10 06:58:53 2021
Jun 05, 2021
They’re smaller, but I picked more cherries from our feral cherry tree this year
—orc Sat Jun 5 23:58:04 2021
Jun 04, 2021
Doing a load of wash
—orc Fri Jun 4 22:17:11 2021
—30—
![[rss feed]](/~orc/feedbutton.png "Atom + RSS feeds available here"){kind=small}