Lake Shore Live Steamers.com

Located at

Penitentiary Glen
8668 Kirtland-Chardon Rd
Kirtland, Ohio 44094

This work session is mainly for pumpkin carving and Bonnie Zaken and Frank Smoley are carrying pumpkins from the bins of pumpkins that the Park provided as Trish Koontz and Judy Oscker hollow out some pumpkins. A pattern was placed on the pumpkin and punched through.

It was a cool day and Judy has rubber gloves to keep her hands warm from working inside the pumpkins. The two bins of pumpkins sit on pallets that the Park set out for us near the station for us to carve.

While we were working on the pumpkins, Rick Nagy was in the perpetual job of blowing leaves off the track in the yard as fall settles in. John Koontz brought his little front end loader to scrape up our ballast pile and load the ballast car.

A good view of John loading the ballast car with his front end loader, which is far easier than doing it by hand with a shovel. Rick working on the leaves that have accumulated at Horrendous to clear the tracks for the run this weekend.

Back at the station Judy, Edith Hacker, Trish and Dave Hird who is using a saber saw to cut the tops out, work on the pumpkins as Frank watches the action. Ken Brooks talks to John about using the front end loader to carry the tables back up to the tent.

Trish cleaning out the innards and seeds, putting them in the 5 gallon pail, one pumpkin at a time in an assembly-line fashion. Trish holds the pumpkin as Dave using a drill with like a beater on the end to try to clean out the inside of the pumpkins, but it didn't work very well.

Ken, Dave, Harry Tabor, Trish and Judy continue working on the pumpkins cutting out the tops in cleaning out the insides for the next crew shift that comes to do the carving. John Koontz was running the engine for the ballast spreading as Dick Clark operated the chute gates to control the flow.

The crew working as a team, as some just cut out the tops and others cleaned out the innards with the goal to do all the pumpkins before carving them. The track crew was ballasting the track at East Wind and it will still need to be swept to level it.

Working up on the Branch Line, Dick uses a shovel to pry open the chute gate plate. After dumping at load of ballast. John used his tractor to get another bucket full of ballast.

Dick uses the shovel to keep the ballast flowing down through the chute as they ballast along Filmor. John slowly moves ahead as Dick keeps the ballast flowing, as that end of the ballast cars is near empty.

While we were in the woods on the Branch Line the sky darkened and the wind freshened, signaling an empending rain as we continue to ballast, the track. It started to rain and was time to lay down the tools and get back to the station as the sky looked threatening.

Well the skys did open up and did it rain as most of us took shelter at the station. It rained hard enough to flood the tracks in front of the station.

More people showed up and commenced with the carving of the pumpkins using printed designs that some brought and others freelanced the carving while it continued to rain. One of the carved pumpkins sitting on the table, which will be lit by candles for our run.

Kim Greene looks through a pattern book as more members arrive to carve pumpkins. This pumpkin don't look that frightening but either he got into a fight or he had a bad night of drinking.

Most of the pumpkins were all cleaned out and what remained had to be carved but we had fewer pumpkins this year as it was just a little over 100 of them and two were rotted out in the bottom when I picked them up. After the pumpkins were carved they were loaded on the train to be stored in the train shed until Friday.

Kitty Shriver engrossed into carving one of her kitty cat pumpkins as Mike Uhrich in the background takes time out to enjoy a hot bowl of soup. Bill Deptowicz and Ron Malinowski were working on their pumpkin creations..... At least the rain stopped.