Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Buzz Morisette has glazed several of the new windows he built for ATSF 1400 caboose.  They are a thing of beauty.  Here he is wrestling with clean up of the gooey butyl rubber compound we use in place of traditional glazing putty.  That old fashioned glazing putty hardens and shrinks, falls out and fails over time.  This stuff has stood the test of time, maintaining a flexible watertight seal for several years.  But it can be troublesome to work with.

With much of the cleaning behind him, Buzz is ready to add the final coat of gray interior paint to the windows.

Nick Kallas was visiting the shop, and Victor Humphreys is showing him the complicated joinery for a new window for Norfolk & Western 2050.  The steel plate beside the new wood parts is a 'new' discovery in the past week.  The finished wood window gets a fairly heavy sheet of metal placed over its exterior.

Dan Fenlaciki helped glue and square up two more new windows for Illinois Central 3996 Diner.  Six are now so assembled.

Could that caption be wrong?  No, Marcus Ruef delivered new lumber for the wood shop crew to make up new decking for two of our four wheel track cars.  Those guys just do not like to work in comfort - it has to be either too cold or too hot for them to really enjoy themselves.  So our wood shop sawdust guys will do the cutting.

Call me all about lazy, or all about easy.  But this time I will put all project work under the Wood Shop category.  Let's start out with Cleveland Transit System 4223.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to Dave Rogan who is a new volunteer at IRM.  He walked in in the morning and by afternoon was hard at work on doing the window sash restoration work on CTS 4223.

Al Reinschmidt is a long time member and volunteer but he made a fairly rare Wednesday appearance and also joined in the fray, here shown cleaning some of the tracks for the windows.

Lorne Tweed is a regular worker on the 4223 project and as usual it was hard to distract him with corny jokes. Very committed to the work at hand.  Not in these pics was Simon Harrison - yes - working on more sash.  The good news is that the stack of completed parts and sash is looking much larger than the stack of items remaining.

Buzz Morrisette is on the home stretch for the large batch of new windows for ATSF 1400 caboose.  We caught him mitering and cutting to length the many small strips of quarter round to retain the glazing.

Tim Peters is 'back in the saddle' or in this case making a set of new saddles for the roof of Chicago Rapid Transit 1797.  There is something about the smell of white oak sawdust early in the morning.

John Faulhaber is sighting along two pieces destined to become new windows for Illinois Central diner 3996.  We try to mass produce parts exactly the same for each new 'order' or group of windows, but the last step is to match and custom fit the pieces before gluing.

Victor Humphreys, Simon Harrison, and I took two of the completed frame sets and got them permanently glued and in the press to set up while being held square and true.

Pete Galayda just keeps plugging along on the Charles City Western 300 locomotive.  He is working to restore a headlight resistance box and it sits beside a newly refinished controller cover.

Steady work equals steady progress.  Alex Randow just will not give up, and continues to clean and restore aluminum sash for this car.  Note that he is wearing a NY GIANTS hat!  Alex hails from the New Jersey area and it gives one pause to gain such insight into the character of your workmates.  Is it a good move to wear that in the Midwest?  Just kidding, Alex.

It is no less attractive to remove crud, bend the tracks straight, and clean the tracks needed for these windows.  Many surfaces, grooves and folds in the metal.  Lorne Tweed grits his teeth and continues the process.  He is nothing if not persistent.

Meanwhile, Bill Wulfert (above) located a headlight lens while Eric Lorenz proceeded to fabricate a reflector, install socket, wiring and bulb.  In short order a temporary power supply was rigged up and THERE WAS LIGHT!  This car looks to be ready to leave at any time if we have a long enough extension cord.

Here is a quick tour of some of the work we saw going on in the Wood Shop yesterday. You may notice the recurring theme of WINDOWS - good work in the shop during the winter, and we never seem to run out of them.

John Faulhaber has been under the weather lately but we welcomed him back and promptly put him to work on fitting the frames for the new windows for Illinois Central 3996.

Buzz Morisette continued making new windows for Santa Fe 1400 caboose.  Here he has manufactured small quarter round to be used in holding the glazing, and is painting them.

Victor Humphreys (pictured) and I worked to resolve the odd angles and many parts for new windows on the front of the cab for our Norfolk & Western 2050 locomotive.  These are really different and seemingly no parallel edges.  Tough work when there are only 'shards' of an incomplete original to work from.

Simon Harrison continued cleaning the aluminum sash for our Cleveland Transit 4223 PCC car.

Roger Kramer cleaned and primed several pieces of hardware destined for our Pullman FLOYD RIVER.  I believe this car has examples of open section berths, once so common, and found in a few of the cars in our collection

Here are four new bushings machined to order, here resting in the midst of their heat treatment.  A total of six new were made today.  Earlier in the week Gerry Dettloff did some fitting and grinding to mate the new pedestal liners to the truck frames.

A lot is happening very quickly on this project.  As reported previously the next step is to do repair and rebuilding work on the dismantled truck now in our shop.  The immediate focus is on the pins and bushings which hold together brake rigging, the slack adjusters, etc.

Before we get into the details of that work we were pleased to note that an entire set of new pedestal liners has been fabricated and delivered.  These are wear parts to allow the journal boxes to slide vertically as needed, when the car is in motion.

Jeff Brady has been busily engaged for some weeks as the truck is dismantled, taking careful measurements, and tabulating the needed new parts.

Jeff created this schematic to help keep track and identify the complex connections and pieces.  Note that there are 78 bushings and 26 pins, needed for EACH truck assembly!

Greg Kepka was pressing out the old bushings from the various rods and levers.  It was somewhat disconcerting to hear screeching and clanking like breaking glass as the rusted old bushings broke free and became loose.

Here are some of the links, old bushings, and newly loosened bushings that Greg was working on.

Rod Turner was turning new alloy steel rod to size in the small lathe.

Here is the new small furnace/oven for heat treating newly fabricated pins and bushings to case harden them.  Four of the new pins are on the bench in front of the oven, having undergone their particular version of a trial by fire.