Friday, June 23th, Anchorage Yard.

Are you still reading this journal?!?  Get a life!  Okay, I'll keep this chapter short.

After a pig out breakfast at Fort Richardson, our group headed to the Alaska Railroad's Anchorage shop for a tour.  Josh Coran, Chief Mechanic, loaned us brand new hard hats to assemble and wear .  We split into two groups and began the tour of the shops.  We toured the locomotive shops and were able to walk through the cabs of both a GP40 and an SD70MAC.  At the car shop, we were permitted walk through the new Grandview (formerly Florida Fun Train) cars as well as the Alaska Railroad's business car, the Denali.    We then headed outside to see some other cars including the rotary snow plow.

We made a visit to Boy Scout Camp Gorsuch and then headed to Palmer to return camping equipment we had borrowed from our brother troop.  When we got back to Anchorage, we discovered we had not returned all the equipment.  Grrrr!  Since we did not have time for another trip to Palmer, I called fellow Alaska Railroad railfan Richard Wise to see if he could hold the equipment for a week.  He agreed to pick up the equipment later that evening at the Sea Galley, our group's farewell dinner location.  The bad news is the return of this equipment would eat three hours out of my railfanning time later in the trip.  The good news is that it would provide me the opportunity to link up with an email friend living in Palmer.  More on this later.