As Peter has mentioned we went from fairly warm to windy jacket weather
over the weekend. This was our third trip down there. The first was
many years ago, during an event called Dicken's on the Strand. Locals
dress up in Dicken's era costumes as a prelude to Christmas.
Additionally a group of handcar enthusists laid some panel track near
the depot and staged handcar races.
Last time, pre-Ike we had a little wind to deal with also, but this
weekend was the worse. I couldn't figure out what the wind velicoty was
in 1/64--perhaps we had a hurricane.
We've been invited back?? I had asked for an indoor spot this year but
somehow we were not favored with a better location.
Regarding the museum's collection--it did suffer greatly. Some
restoration is being done, but it will be years to really come back.
Unknown to us was the number of pieces sent to the scrap yard. The
problem that probably doesn't have an easy solution is how to get the
equipment off the Island before the next 'big one'. Some of the
passenger cars were Amtrak approved, but most of the freight cars would
not be allowed on either UP or BNSF tracks. There is much evidence of
cars being re-railed and remounted on their trucks.
One passenger car of interest was a former ATSF business car now
re-named the American Flyer. I photographed the interior extensively
for the ATSF historical society, so those images will be used for its
restoration.
The station building itself housed a couple of very nice custom built HO
layouts plus several model auto collections. All that was destroyed.
Bob Werre
On 10/8/12 6:12 AM, Peter Vanvliet wrote:
We had fun this weekend. The Houston S Gaugers were invited to set up
our layout at the Galveston Railroad Museum. This was an all-weekend
event that they held as a grand re-opening to bring people into the
museum after they sustained quite a bit of damage due to Hurricane Ike
in September 2008. The last time I had been in the museum was about 10
or 12 years ago and I did not notice much of a difference, so they did
a fantastic job getting everything back. Bob Werre mentioned that one
of the cars in their yard had a "water mark line level" marked on the
outside to indicate how far the equipment was under water. I did not
see it, but from what he indicated it must have been 7 feet or more.
My Model Railroad Site <http://pmrr.org/> (RSS feed
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Fourth Ray Software <http://fourthray.com/>
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