Illinois Railway Museum Blog

This is an example of an Edmonton BBC trolley coach. This photo was taken in 1999 and is representative of the coach that will soon be providing service here at IRM!

It has now been two weeks since my term as Director and President has expired, so it’s been back to work in the Trolley Bus Department.  Over the last month or so, we have been working on putting away miscellaneous parts that we have accumulated from Dayton, Toronto and other various sources.  We will need to continue to do this at an accelerated pace since the Board just approved our acquisition of an Edmonton Transit System (ETS) BBC trolley coach!  Originally their system was scheduled to close in 2010 so we have had periodic and very informal contact with them about the possibility of sometime in the future acquiring a coach.  Well Edmonton’s city counsel decided to suddenly and drastically move that schedule up and to make a long story short, their system closed last weekend.  ETS contacted us to let us know they would be willing to donate a coach to us for preservation.  We moved quickly on the acquisition form and presented it to the Board last night.  I’d like to thank the Board for having the foresight to approve this acquisition.

Pictured is the newly installed roof equipment on the Redbirds. Although they did not sport poles in regular service, having them will allow us to run these cars in service, giving our visitors the experience of riding the only preserved NY subway cars outside of the NE United States.

In addition to working within the department, volunteer resources of the Trolley Bus Department have been on loan to the New York Subway Cars (the “Redbirds”) project.  Richard Schauer and I (mostly Richard) have been assisting Jerry Saunders in preparing for his 12 year long dream to come true – having the New York subway cars in the operating fleet.  We are very close!  Over the last several weeks, poles have been put on the cars to allow them to operate.  Extensive testing and troubleshooting has been done and yesterday they made 3 trips around the carline and 4 on the main line with ZERO problems!!!  The goal is to get them ready for the 4^th of July trolley pageant, then shortly thereafter get them into service.  Several YouTube videos have been posted by a number of different people.

Part of the Redbirds crew including the supervisor, Alco.

Since the Trolley Bus technical crew will be giving the Redbirds a final tune-up on the pit for the next couple weeks, the rest of us will be continuing in earnest to get the garages clean, organized and ready for the imminent arrival of the BBC coach.  Our first scheduled service day is Saturday, June 6 so we will be spending Memorial Day weekend doing inspections.