Top of the Mountain Siding - Official Work Thread

[Fred L. Kuhns]

Mike, Will the woods road ever reach out to the highway?  How much wider will the field need to be for the saw and shingle mills to have room for their operation ?  Thanks for all the pictures and discussion of the progress at the TOM.   Fred L. Kuhns

[James Patten]

The woods road can only go so far to the west before it hits Trout Brook.  The stream is in a deep valley.  Beyond the valley is our property line.  And it can't go east very far until it hits that property line.

[Mike Fox]

Fred,
We are planning to cut about as much as we did last winter. What we have cut now would work, but there is talk of moving some of our events up there. If that happens, we need the room and want to be ready.

[Fred L. Kuhns]

 Mike & James, Thanks for your reply.  Fred L. Kuhns

[Mike Fox]

Here is stump row, aka the root ranch.





After this morning, this is what it looks like now

[John McNamara]

VERY impressive!

[Greg Klein]

T.O.M. has always looked like that, right?  What stumps?

[John Kokas]

Any chance some of those stumps could be used for the bonfires later in the year?

[Joe Fox]

Unfortunately stumps really don't burn well.

[Gordon Cook]

Question:
What did they do back in the day before backhoes and bulldozers?

[Brendan Barry]

Dynamite, picks, shovels, and draft animals.

[Mike Fox]

Pulled stumps with horses and oxen. That was after digging them by hand..used some of the stumps to build stump fences...

[Marcel Levesque]

Harry told me a story about how a local farmer wanted to remove a stump and came up with this idea.  He dug several small, deep holes under the stump as long as his arm and then buried apples in the holes and then covered them up.  Then he erected a fence around the stump and then put a few pigs in the fence.  They would dig furiously for the fruit uncovering most of the stump roots and then a plow horse was used to pull the remaining stump from the ground.  Quite ingenious using what you normally would find around on a farm. A Harry story for sure.

[Pete "Cosmo" Barrington]

So has any serious thought been given to what sort of station,/platform/shed will be built for those detraining at TOM?

[Mike Fox]

Woohooo! Last stump! For now...






Had an unexpected guest. I had just finished talking to Cindy on the phone getting permission to follow the train south then I turned and she was watching me. Not real concerned..