Santa’s Workshop Yields Big Gifts for Watco Watco’s Director of Locomotive Support Tex Inman came from Texas to Pittsburg, Kansas, on December 1 in the guise of a jolly man named Santa Claus. The gifts that Inman brought were too big to fit in the bag Santa normally carries, so he had to use a U-Haul to deliver them to the Watco office. The gifts? Two 7-foot-tall toy soldiers made from leftover materials that Inman found at Watco mechanical shops he’d visited the past few months. One of the creations is a drummer boy and the other is a flag bearer. Both are currently on display in the lobby at the Pittsburg office. “I saw a couple of the toy soldiers someone had made in our area, and they were asking $1,500 for them. They were just made up from odds and ends of junk, and they were about 4-foot tall. I figured that I could make my own for less than that,” said Inman. And make them he did. But Inman decided that he needed to do something bigger to really stand out on his front porch, so he went higher with the ones he made. Inman figured since he needed to come north to visit some of the company’s Kansas repair shops, he should bring a couple of his soldiers for the Watco office, since they were made of Watco parts. The busy Inman spread the work out over a couple of months and built the soldiers during his spare time when he wasn’t helping with projects at church or completing honey-dos for his wife. “If I had worked on them straight through, it might have been a two-day project,” Inman said. In addition to the metal parts from the shops, the toy soldiers also have parts made out of PVC pipe. When Inman was working on the trolly that runs in Webb City, Missouri’s, King Jack Park, he saw they had some PVC pipe there that would be perfect for his soldiers. Inman said, “I asked Jim Dawson (trolley driver and Southwest Missouri Electric Railway Association board member) where he got the PVC and told him what I was wanting to do with it. He called up the company that sold it and had them cut the pieces that I needed and brought it back to me.”
8 The Dispatch | December 2020
The only items that Inman had to purchase for the toy soldiers were special paints to use on the PVC so that it would withstand the outdoor weather conditions, and some decals that he used on them. After Inman surprised Watco Executive Chairman Rick Webb with the soldiers, he hopped in his sleigh (aka pickup truck) and headed back home to Texas to play Santa to other lucky individuals.
