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Choo Choo Details

The weather fought me all through this sculpture. The pile was delivered from a nearby parking lot and sat for a day before I got to it. The night before I started it rained and the next day it was in the thirties. By the time I had finished the sculpture in my yard the snow on the pile had a nice and sticky rime about five inches thick all over it. I used that wet coating to build the cab. I also roughly sculpted the cylindrical tank in the front of the cab. I was counting on the forecast to help me out. It had been predicted that both Saturday and Sunday would be in the thirties and I though it might stay warm Saturday evening too. No such luck.

When I returned for two hours of work on Sunday it was well below freezing. The Cab made of slushy snow had turned to ice. I had to use an ice chipper to trim it down and put in windows. That was two hours of slow painful work. I had hoped to get it all done over the weekend but it was obvious that I would have to come back on Monday.

Monday was much better. It hovered at just about freezing most of the day but snow was falling off the roof of the building next to me and the sun was shining on it. I discovered that I had built the cab at a bad angle to the tank in front and so that the tank and cab were bent in relation to each other. I had to add snow on one side of the tank and scrape it off the other side to straighten it out. It was pointless to try to change the cab since it was still ice.

By the end of four hours of sculpting Monday the temperatures had risen considerably. I added all the doodads to the top of the tank with warm snow. Unfortunately the forecasters were wrong again. It never got below freezing so when I returned the following day intending to dig out wheels I found that the squarish light in the front and the smokestake had crumbled in the night.

The snow was warm and sticky in the morning and I thought it would be pointless to replace the doodads but it was so warm that the cab had gotten soft. I decided to put an engineer in the cab. I had to fill up the three small windows that I had started out with and then carved two much larger windows. I had plenty of good snow to build my conductor. I wasn't sure he would last the night.

I did this in an hour and went home for several hours and didn't return until 3:30PM. I quickly put on a new light and smokestack but both were hasty. I figured they would probably disentigrate too so I didn't want to put a lot of time into them.