Hot.

I think the temperature up at the railroad today was about 105°. At any rate, at 5 pm the thermometer at the shop — which is in the shade — read 99°. It was quite hot. Ellen and I and Joseph worked on digging up some raised planting beds near the roundhouse. The bushes which had occupied them had died from a lack of light combined with little feet. It's quite easy for a child to climb from the benches between the beds onto the beds themselves, and the bushes had long died off. It was the sort of day where one works 15 minutes and then takes a half-hour break.

The crew had rigged up some low-pressure drip sprinklers into a branch near the ticket booth, so we had about 8 square feet of gentle rain under one of the Redwoods. It was terrific on such a hot day. Grant and JP were trading shifts on locomotive number 11, a 4-6-0 10-Wheeler type named "Sequoia". I got a footplate ride with JP at one point, during which he demonstrated the things to look for when a loco is running well. It's hard to explain, actually, being a combination of the look of the smoke and the sound of the "puff". I get the feeling that it's something that takes a while to learn, like driving a stick-shift but more so.

It was Grant's day off, but he'd agreed to fill in for somebody so he was itching to get away early. I wound up working the platform for the last hour and a half. This involves punching the tickets of the passengers, keeping people on the platform behind the white line when the train is arriving or departing, and generally keeping an eye on things around the platform.

I'm on my way to take a shower and go to sleep, so I won't tell you in this post about Colorado. My wife and I went out to Denver to visit her brother and sister-in-law, and we took in a visit to the Colorado Railroad Museum and Tiny Town, but that's going to be another post.