Thursday, February 28, 2013

Winter has arrived

It seems winter has finally arrived here in southern middle Tennessee. After several days of cool rainy and breezy weather we had a bit of sleet and even a few snow flakes last night, and the forecast is for cold temperatures and snow through Saturday night. After spending most of my life in the upper plains and dealing with mind-numbing cold and blizzards every winter this should be a walk in the park, but it seems I've acclimated  and am now a Southerner, because this cold snap feels REALLY cold!

 So much so that I haven't gotten motivated to do anything with the Caboose yet. It is still sitting at a cockeyed angle on the driveway where it was unloaded.  The acreage here has a somewhat level area next to the road, roughly triangular in shape, where the house and shed are located, then it drops off dramatically right behind the house. How dramatically you ask? I can barely climb up the old old logging road that runs diagonally across the hillside and it's at a far easier grade than the hill itself. The driveway slopes down towards the "cliff" with a flat area just before the drop off that is large enough to park the Caboose for the demo and rebuild, but right now it's still sitting on the sloped area.  I need to hook up to it and straighten it out and move it a bit further back to where the ground is more level, but with all the rain I'm concerned about the truck slipping on the slope. I've got a very vivid imagination, and I can just see the Caboose and my truck both sliding backwards on the wet grass and slipping over the precipice, then careening down the hill taking out small trees and leaving large pieces of truck and trailer along the way.  LOL

 Due to the angle it's sitting at I'm not comfortable even going inside. Just standing on the boarding platform makes it want to do a wheelie, so for now the Caboose just sits patiently as it has for the last who-knows-how-many years, waiting for the sun and warmer weather, dreaming of going down the road on a great adventure.




Monday, February 25, 2013

Homeward bound!

After several false starts, yesterday was finally the day to move the Caboose home! I'll admit I was a bit nervous about getting it loaded onto a trailer in one piece. Despite getting bad directions from his GPS which sent him a few miles in the wrong direction, the shipper backtracked from Eddyville and arrived at the Marina just before I did.


He looked the Caboose over carefully and aired up the flat tires before backing his trailer up to the Caboose. Let the winching begin!


The bottom of the Caboose was very close to scraping on both the front and the rear, but once the tires started up the ramp the clearance at the ends improved. The next issue was the low hanging plumbing in front of the axles.There was much checking for clearance, then inching it forward, then rechecking, then a little more movement, then more checking.


The pipes did rub for a couple inches, and I fully expected them to break up or just shatter due to their age, but somehow it all stayed together.

It's on the trailer! YAY!  It was secured with several chains and tie-downs, then he started putting some tie-downs over the top to help keep the siding from coming off on the highway.

As he tightened the first one he asked if I could see the roof, and was it getting flattened or damaged? I just about burst out laughing and told him the roof was in trouble long before he put anything over the top of it. Does this look like a pristine roof to you?  LOL


 All strapped down and ready to roll.


I snapped a quick pic of the sunset over the lake before we pulled out.

The drive home took about 4 hours at a nice leisurely pace with one fuel stop, and I was grinning like an idiot following behind it going down the interstate. Nothing flew off or fell off the Caboose which pleased me no end. We also managed to get it unloaded in the driveway instead of on the street, again with no issues.

I am very pleased with the guy who hauled it for me, he was very professional and extremely careful with my fragile pile of scrap metal, definitely someone I would recommend.   He also expressed the opinion that the frame isn't in as poor condition as I believed it to be, and he thought that a good welder should be able to fix it up fairly easily. I sure hope he's right about that!

Tomorrow I get to start photographing every square inch of the beast and measuring everything I can think to measure in preparation for the disassembly process.





Monday, February 11, 2013

Some great news, some not-so-great news.

The Caboose is tentatively coming home this week! I talked to the shipper and he has a load going to Louisville early Wednesday morning, and said either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning the haul to TN will happen. He wants to move it during daylight hours so we can see if any parts go flying off or if it starts to disintegrate on the trip. Hopefully the frame holds up for the loading onto his trailer. The fellow seems quite knowledgeable and has a lot of experience moving antique vehicles of all sorts so I have faith it will arrive in one piece.

On a not-such-great-news front, I am now officially a victim of credit card theft. I got a call from the fraud division late Thursday, and a follow-up call to my bank Friday morning confirmed that the card had been cancelled, but not before someone went on a shopping spree in Paris, France, effectively cleaning out and overdrawing the checking account the card was attached to. The charges started hitting my account today, so tomorrow I get to try and deal with getting the proper forms for getting my money back faxed here so I can fill them out and fax them back. What joy! I'm just glad I have more than one checking account so I'm not flat broke for the rest of the month.