Just found out about the event in Calera being canceled the last two days of the event in April due to the storms. As a long time Thomas Event Director, I cannot imagine what they went through on this and likely are still going through. Hope the storms didn't do too much physical damage to the museum, though the financial damage has to be pretty bad. Generally I think for many groups, the second weekend tends to be where the money is made, the first weekend pays the costs. Worse yet, they probably ended up "buying" quite a bit of merchandise as well.

Apparently TVRM donated a portion of its ticket proceeds from HOD ticket holders back to HOD, very nice to see this.

Really, something like this could be a much bigger problem for a group than our group's literal track washout or the flooding at Mid-Continent. Hope things work out for them!

David Farlow
Whitewater Valley Railroad

David,
I was the conductor that day and it was a disaster. Fortunately, we had the majority of the visitors on the train when the storm hit. We were about 3 miles down the line when the depot radioed me and told me to keep the train there until they cleared us to come back. The heart of the storm didn't hit the train, but we did have some strong wind & rain while sitting there. After about 20 min. we headed back. Had to clear a tree on the tracks on the way back.

Upon arrival back at the depot it was utter devestation. Entire venue wiped out, vender tents and, most importantly, the merchandise tent, were all down, blown away, etc. Lots of damaged Thomas mdse. (Big Loss!) Fortunately we had no injuries.

We had to cancel the event, refund the money, since there was no way to recover to continue the rest of the weekend.

As for the museum itself, only damage to the depot roof and an old wooden box car. Lots of litter, of course. Zippo media coverage about it!

I'm not at liberty to discuss numbers, but it will be a sizeable loss financially and is really causing us to tighten the belt all summer and put off some projects.

Better luck next year.
Bill