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Weekly News September 3, 2012Description
A Special Steam Car Tour, 1997: In the “News” of August 20, I told of secondary steam car tours held in the eastern U.S., supplementing the “main” tour often held in June. I indicated that 1993 was the final year for two such tours in the East in one year. I forgot one: Ruth and I “ran” a progressive steam car tour in the Finger Lakes region of New York in mid-September 1997, on which we had about 12 cars participating. It is difficult to cover all details for such a tour when living nearly 300 miles from the tour’s location, but others have done it well, such as Connie Nydam and the Illinois group at Kalamazoo in 1993, the Cruses in Ohio in 2006, and the Cantors at Saratoga Springs in 2009. I’m sure the Steam Car Tour in southeastern Iowa last week, chaired by Mike Roach of Libertyville, Illinois, well over 200 miles from his home, has also been outstanding. During Labor Day weekend (1997), I typed the final version of the itinerary, much as I’m doing this Labor Day weekend in a greatly diminished version.
Our starting and ending point where we kept our trailers was a former corporate retreat just north of Hamilton, New York. The location was nice, and the facilities were spacious, but the management was inferior; however, no one complained. On our first day, we drove to Cooperstown on Otsego Lake after stopping at a new antique car museum in Norwich. In the baseball capital, we took over a very nice guest house where all of us were accommodated for two nights. The lake provides the source of the East Branch of the Susquehanna River, and the area was home to two distinguished Americans of the 19th century. James Fennimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, for whose family the town was named, lived on a scenic property on the west side of the lake, and Abner Doubleday, considered to be the inventor of baseball, who was more famous in his own time as a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, provided Cooperstown’s claim to fame. Members of our tour enjoyed dinner one evening at the luxurious Otesaga Hotel on the south shore of the lake.
Traveling westward, we stopped one night at Cazenovia on the small lake of the same name, and the following day, at 120 miles the longest mileage of the tour, we kept going west to Canandaigua via Ithaca and Watkins Glen. At Canandaigua for two nights, we visited the Sonnenberg Gardens and the Gideon Granger home. Traveling eastward again, we passed the north end of Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, had lunch at a winery near Ovid, New York, and paused at the Womans’ Suffrage Museum in Seneca Falls, before settling in for two nights at Skaneateles, a getaway resort for Syracuse, less than 20 miles away. The very last day, we retraced our steps to the starting point on Lake Moraine near Hamilton, the campus of Colgate University being just south of town. (The Model 740 in our collection came from Robert B. Chase of Earlville, six miles south of Hamilton.)
We had the White steamers of Jim and Eleanor Weidenhammer and Dick and Judy Wells on the tour, as well as about eight Stanleys, including that of the late Fran and Betty Duveneck of Monterey, California, and Con Fletcher and Eva Morrison of Golden, Colorado. The other cars were from the East (we had our Model 76 Stanley). Jim and Judy Hancock drove the luggage-and-trouble vehicle that consisted of my 1985 GMC Suburban and JAC 22-foot trailer, both long-since gone (the vehicles, not the Hancocks, who are members of FAHP).
Work Report
A total of 18 volunteers attended the work session on August 28, and the following work was done during the session:
• The popcorn machine was moved up to the shop
• The cars were moved in the museum to make room to scrape the floor
• The center two sections of the museum floor were scraped by hand to prepare them for painting
• The right kingpin on the model 87 was tightened and the locknut tightened
• The right front wheel bearing was found to be loose due to an undersized cotter pin allowing the nut to loosen. The bearing was re-tightened and a proper size cotter pin installed.
• The locomotives in the shop basement were checked for readiness to run on Sunday
• The electric car was checked over for Sunday
• The electric trains were made ready for Sunday and some track cleaning was done
• Some excess parts were moved from the shop to the museum attic as part of the shop organization
• Work continued on the water tank for the 607
On August 30, 15 attended and did the follow:
• Museum cleaned and roped off for the Sunday Steamin’ Event
• 2 locomotives checked over, cleaned, and greased for the Sunday event
• Electric car moved to the museum and parked for easy access for its use on Sunday
• All AVRR track curves checked for level and some coupler bolts replaced, where missing
• AVRR track blown off of debris and drive flange ways cleaned
• The Model 607’s new burner brackets installed with special fasteners
• Model 607’s wood door top boards wet sanded, work continues
• Model 607’s boiler piping work continues, other re-assembly work also continues
• Model 725 burner forks cleaned
• Model 740 oil leak in rear end work continues
