Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Karmic flashback

Last Saturday was a workday at the train restoration yard. I had started painting, but got pulled off because the paint needed to be thinned and we didn't have any thinner. So I started work on the Baggage car (NWP 605). A couple of us pulled some non original wood off one end, and then started removing much of the roofing materials. Much of this was done after lunch when it had gotten warmer. Not a lot of fun and I was sore the next day. So I got to thinking that Monday was predicted to be cooler and I had nothing better to do, so 8 a.m. Monday I'm on the roof.

As I'm tearing off stuff, a motorcycle cop drives by and glances at me. I immediately flash back to when I was a kid. When I was very young, a troublemaking friend had this brilliant idea to climb on top of this decrepit single car garage on a dead end street, which became the bridge of a warship and we were fighting off attacking planes with the only weapons at our disposal, pieces of composition roof. They sail very nicely BTW. Later that evening my dad gets a phone call from the LOL who kept her car in that garage.

So my friend and I had to go down immediately and clean up our mess. The roofing, being old and brittle broke into zillions of pieces which had to be swept up of course. Our dad's spent the weekend reroofing her garage. I don't specifically remember the punishment, but I'm guessing I wasn't comfortable sitting for awhile.

In the top shot, the heaviest layers ( about an inch of tar and paper) have already been taken off.

 The green in the foreground is the original canvas based roofing. I left it on for now for documentation, and it looks kind of cool.
So far, I have gotten only compliments, but I don't think I will be playing war games on garage roofs again.

No comments:

Post a Comment