I dub thee "Loose Cannon"

This weekend has been more labor intensive than the work-week I was trying to recreate away from. Isn't volunteer work grand? The day begain in Brightside yard as it always does. I arrived to find that the ballast car (see the entry from sept. 28) was still buried at the end of north lead no. 4. This lead is not yet fully built. It is being constructed by GGRM to store their stuff now that they are being moved from their current premises. With no ballast car, we couldn't do any tie replacement (badly needed in prep for the train of lights). Instead we got to take the Fairmont Tamper out. It's a big machine with a giant robotic hand on one end. You position the fingers over a railroad tie and push a button. They fingers begin to vibrate very fast and are rammed into the ballast the tie sits on. As the fingers shake, the ballast compacts around them. Contents may settle in shipping. This thing is really cool. The amount of human labor it saves is immense. We managed to tamp over a third of lead no. 4 in just a few hours. Brett had been doing it by hand with a steel bar. We switched all of the junk out of the way in order to free our ballast car and decided to give him a mechanical hand (can you say "liquifaction" boys and girls?). There was still a lot of shoveling though. The next day put me to work with the Niles Planning Committee in clearing a bit of county land of fencing and tumbleweed. During lunch I was inducted into the ranks of the "Loose Cannons." These are the members of the PLA that think that progress is a good thing. They are working on getting me to grade the upper yard. We don't have an upper yard yet. We have a hill. I have access to tractors. Crap. What have I gotten myself into?