An Update and exciting news!!!

Hello friends!

What a tremendous year 2018 was for the Bartlett Roundhouse Preservation Society and the needed repairs on the roundhouse! After we received the grant from the LCHIP organization in December of 2017, it took us a while to get all the pieces in place to begin the work, but we did it! Work started finally in October.

Our partners in this project, the New Hampshire Dept of Transportation, acting as our construction managers, worked closely with Burke and Sons Construction to gather the necessary materials, repair the bottom sills along much of the front of stall one and a portion of the rear of the wall on stall four, and begin the lengthy job of residing and repairing the window mounts and plywood to help keep the building more secure. 

Weather precluded finishing off the top part of the stall four walls, which will wait until spring. Still in the plan is to add some plywood to the rear of stalls three and four and put in some form of grating at the top to allow for good air flow in the structure. We also still hope to get some work done on the rear side of stall two, but costs increased on us during the time we were organizing the grant access and the time we began the construction work so we will be needing an additional $10,000 to $15,000 beyond what the grant and matching funds from the state will allow us to accomplish. 

The painting will happen in the spring on the completed walls, matching the paint on the rear of stalls one and two. And, we now have our own crossing over the Mountain Division main line near to the Route 302 crossing; it is cabled, so access requires a key (I have them in hand and will distribute them to the required users at our next business meeting this coming spring).

Future projects we are working toward include adding the machine shop structure back onto the rear of stalls three and four, and adding the office back onto the side of stall four (to become our archive location). We also want to create a nature trail out through the woods behind the roundhouse that will tour and define all of the spots on the property where important work was done back in the day. We also want to work toward getting our snowplow finished off cosmetically and to get the boxcar repaired and weather tight.

We invite all of you to help us fund this additional work with donations sent to our PO Box, or contact our secretary to pay through PayPal. It will be greatly appreciated!

I want to thank everyone involved in making this work a reality, as it has really moved us forward toward our goal of opening a railroad museum dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of railroading in Crawford Notch and the northern New Hampshire area!

Let's make 2019 another banner year!

Pete Davis
President
Bartlett Roundhouse Preservation Society