Entries by Robert Kutella

Welcome to the blog for the Freight Car Department at the Illinois Railway Museum. Here you will see updates on projects, maintenance and repair schedules and news on pending or proposed acquisitions. Also, our department seems to be the defacto manager of the IRM Woodshop. Stay tuned for notes on projects that include making piles of sawdust.

Our department also does a lot of the artwork and lettering for our restored cars, and in addition to freight cars, has included electric cars, internal combustion, steam locomotives, and steam passenger cars. You may see some of this work posted in the blog.

The images on these blogs are 'thumbnails' only, but if you click on them with the left mouse button, you will see the full image. If there is a project you are interested in, please contact me and we will try to get pics/updates of work our dept may be doing in that area.

To take advantage of the info elsewhere on the IRM website you will also see links to other areas of interest.

Bob Kutella
Collection Curator

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.