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News Letter Index |
Jim Strain, club president, gives a weekly report of happenings at the railroad.
We were very fortunate to have another great weather day on Sunday. This brought out 967 paying passengers for the season finale. Again Steve Marx was excellent as TM, his third week in a row by his choice. Final ticket sales were 15,463 for the year which includes specials. I don't have the exact numbers from 2004 but this comes very close to that record season and this is only the second time in WF&P history that over 15,000 tickets were sold in a season. The count for 2006 was 14,233 so we had a large increase over last year.
Thanks again to all members who participated this year. We could not have been successful without everyone's time and effort. It was great to see how the members responded to our busy season with dedication. All equipment ran very well on Sunday and we had 5 steamers fired up. The next to final passenger train had 180, 535, 400 and 928 as power with 18 cars this was followed by a very successful test run of the 403 by Steve Haack with 9 cars.
I will have more photos of Sunday once I get them from Paul Konopacki. Paul graciously offered to spend Sunday documenting the day's events. Wapelhorst, Wind, Miller, Rands & Pekarek made the trip to StL to attend the season finale, it was good to see all of them again including John Delaney who was able to get away to help for the day.
A special mention of those many members who volunteered their time during the final 6 weeks of the season (and many of them all season):
John Bell
Dale Bitsch (the signals worked great)
Barb Brannan
Mike Brennan
Chris Brophy
Clayton Cullen
Hunter & Gina DeBellis
John Delaney
Kary Eckrich
Tom Ernst
John Errante
Jim Foster
Jerry, Ellen & Laura Fritschle
Brad George
Jim Greathouse
John & Matt Grewe
Steve Haack
Kevin & Ian Harding
Bob Hardt
Jim Keeton
Paul Konopacki
Devin Lawson
Elliott Littlejohn
Mike Lorance
Steve Marx (Mr. October)
Don Miller (California Don)
John Mohen
Ed Moore
Carol Mosbacher (Carol sold most of those 15,000 tickets this year & didn't miss a Sunday)
Wayne Mosbacher
Dave Neubauer
Laura Nichols
Malachi Owens
Richard Owings
Nathan Patterson
Jim Pekarek
Bob Percival
Bob Rands
Lew Schneider
Jim Scott (congrats to Jim as there we NO passenger car derailments this season due to mechanical or track problems)
Jimmy Scott
Paula Shaw
Paul Smith
Dennis Smith
Ron & Sam Spicer
Bob Tabernacki
Greg & Andrew Wapelhorst
Hank Welch (Hank is certainly included when credit is due for lack of derailments, his trackwork is excellent).
Herold & Louise Wind
(I apologize in advance if I missed anyone)
Congratulations to Chris Brophy who has moved to Alamosa Colorado and began his career with the San Luis & Rio Grande RR on Monday. Hopefully Chris will have some spare time to send us photos and updates on the progress of the SL&RG steam program.
Thanks to the Lego group who spent the final 3 Sundays of October running their trains in the GFK for the public. They were able to raise some funds for future endeavors as well as entertaining the many visitors.
I'll have more later.
Jim
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