Lake Shore Live Steamers.com

Located at

Penitentiary Glen
8668 Kirtland-Chardon Rd
Kirtland, Ohio 44094

Today Dave Hird is working on the switches at Horrendous with his lubricating and checking the switch points. Frank Foti slipping the rail into the steel rail clip that we use, as work continues on the track at Gillette.

A view of the track work to be done looking from Gillette towards the Branch Line as Rick Nagy helps Frank with the rail clip joiner. Rick and Dick Clark listen is Frank explains the placement of the rail.

Meanwhile up at the stations the guys had removed the cowling off the Park engine to check and see if they had fixed the leak on one of the hoses and apparently they did. Rick Nagy threw down the shovel by Gillette as he knew I was going to take his picture of him working.

Rick sits back and takes a break after he and I had just scooped out the ballast to lay the track panels in and John Koontz at the other end is working towards us. Here John works on drilling new holes for the rail joiner clips that we bolt together for aluminum to aluminum rail.

John moves the drill back and forth to elongate the holes so the rail will have a chance to move for temperature expansion due to seasonal changes. John uses the tie lifter as Frank screws down the rail as Rick adds missing ties with Dick Clark getting the bolts for the rail joiner's out of a can.

John and Frank work continuing the task of fastening down the rail to the ties and soon we will have to cut some rail to make up the the space between the panels. Dick and Rick at the far end work with the rail joiner splices, bolting them together as John and Frank work at this end.

They just finished tightening up the bolts on the rail joiner underneath Dick's hand and they have to do the offset joint on the other side of the track panel. See it does happen, you can measure twice and have to cut twice.

That's better, now the rail joiner plates can be added as Dick is doing in this view. Dick just put a bolt through the joiner plate to get the spacing for the holes to drill the rail under his hand.

Well the filler rail have been drilled, installed and fastened down to ties as Frank looks over some of his handiwork. Frank spreading some ballast on top of the ties so we can level the sections of track.

Frank spreads more ballast up on top of the track so we will be able to level it to the proper elevation. After leveling the track Frank sweeps down the ballast to the top of the ties.

Dick Clark in the back was cleaning out the switch throw as Rick and I were tamping the track and Frank would add additional ballast as it fell away while tamping. The tamping and ballasting continued till we got up to where Dick was.

Frank got the work engine and backed it up to run the train over the newly laid track to see how it felt. A view of the finished track work looking from Gillette towards Branch Line and that concludes this little project.