Illinois Railway Museum Blog

This will be another quick look at what I saw going on yesterday inside the wood shop.

The the annual running of the Halloween time Terror event is over and it is time for the volunteers to start repairing the damage to equipment, seemingly inevitable every year.  Roger Kramer assigned himself the job of repairing several broken windows.  I bet he has a tough boss for this job.

I saw parts being painted, the saw parts that Henry Vincent has been working on.  Have you seen the saw parts?

We saw those parts last week.  Or did we?  Buzz Morisette was working on a template pattern for new carlines to replace some well rotted wood ones in the X 5000 dynamometer car.  Here he seems to be fitting up a piece of wood for the interior lining of the X 38 snowplow.

Speaking of the X 38, there was a lot of  woodworking progress yesterday.  It was not exactly planned this way, but here is TEAM A, John Faulhaber and Simon Harrison, custom fitting a mortise and tenon joint.  In the morning none of the pieces had been ready for this stage of this work.  But after lunch all 12 pieces had been mortised and the tenons cut.  Up to this point it is somewhat of a mass production set up, all parts receiving much the same operation.

Now that the windows are starting to take shape and be recognizable, each group of four parts is marked for one window, and each of the four joints is custom trimmed and fit.  These two culprits are Jim Leonard and Dave Rogan.  Three of the four volunteers had never really done this type of work for us, but they did just fine.  At the end of the day all three frames destined for the rear end and two side windows of the X 38 were ready for glue.

Much of the work in this shop has the goal of taking a really big piece of wood, and reducing it to much smaller pieces and a pile of sawdust.  In the AM this was one long plank, and it had many cuts laid out and marked to make best use of the plank.  Before lunch it had been crosscut into three shorter more manageable lengths, and all three had passed through the jointer.

Finally these pieces are then ripped to width on the table saw, here being operated by Simon and John.  I think we ended up thirteen pieces of wood cut to dimension, ready to start the process all over again.  Routing, rabbeting, chopping, mortising, tenoning, etc.  These will make two rear facing windows for the cupola cab on the plow.

Victor Humphreys was on hand and tried his skills with an acetylene torch, removing more deteriorated metal from our B&O wagon top boxcar, doing some painting on the X 38 snowplow as it got warmer in the afternoon sun, and finally painting six pieces of metal weatherstripping inside the shop.  Pete Galayda and John Nelligan continued their work on the resistance grids for Charles City Western 300, Tim Peters was mounting new roofboards to CTA 4412, and we saw several others passing through on their way for a tool or part.