Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Picture quality remains poor, more on this at the end of this entry.  For now, please be satisfied with viewing the thumbnails where your eyes sharpen them up.

New Doors

We continue to work and make good progress on wood parts for the Chicago Great Western X 38 snowplow.  John Faulhaber is standing behind a host of new stock that has been roughed out to construct two new doors for the plow.  When starting with rough lumber, in this case heavy planks, there is as much brain work to lay out the parts, as physical work of sawing them up.

Windows

The crew assembled and glued two more windows for the X 38 cab cupola.  Victor Humphreys is making the final tweaks with the frames in the glue press.  That involves squaring them up, making them flat, and checking the pressure on the frames.  When you first tighten up the clamp, some liquid glue will squeeze out and you need to tighten it up a bit after ten minutes.

More Windows

Victor is working on three of the smaller windows for the plow.  Painting is complete and here new glass has been cut to size and dropped into place.  Well, not exactly "dropped'!

Yet More Windows

Tim Peters is moving fast on constructing SEVENTY TWO new windows for Chicago Rapid Transit 1024.  These are being made of quarter sawn white oak and will see stain and varnish in the finishing steps.

New Ceiling

Here is a pic of Tim Peters, Eric Lorenz, Victor (behind me) and Bob Kutella wrestling with large sheets of tempered masonite.  They are being sliced into 15 inch wide panels for new ceilings in the Cleveland Transit System PCC 4223.  My initial thought was that my feeble hands could not hold the camera still, and that contributed to the blurring.  Here, another younger member took the pic and no improvement.  On all of these, you will find good focus in some small part of the image, usually in the foreground.

Engineering

Rich Witt continues to be our Engineering resource, working diligently to plan the work, make good drawings, and assure the wood parts will fit as intended.  He continues here for us needing two round top windows for one of the Boston & Maine passenger cars.  One of the badly deteriorated examples is lying on the drafting table for measurements and examination.

PHOTOS:  As mentioned above I now think the problem may not be with my shaky hands.  I spent considerable time at home yesterday fiddling with the settings and maybe made some progress.  I greatly resist loaning the camera for others to take pics, but as my legs also do not work very well, I have done this three times in recent months.  I tell them the only button to press is the shutter.  So, I am thinking the original 'point and click' settings have been compromised and I struggle to set them back to what worked.  (I lied in my comment reply to Randy Stahl since the small print instruction book has 209 pages.)  It is cumbersome at best, poor illustrations and directions, poor troubleshooting.  Gone are the days of the corner photo shop where you could actually talk to someone and get help with such setup.  If you are getting as frustrated as I and want me to suspend these news entries, feel free to cast your vote.