Illinois Railway Museum Blog

I see I have been negligent in updating this group. A great many things have happened since February.

Spring Inspections: Starting in March, Adam, Andy and I have walked all 5 miles of main line, and the carline, looking for track defects. And did we find defects! We found and repaired no fewer than 8 cracked joint bars, one complete pull apart aka.. two bolts on one side of a joint were broken/missing. We also had several broken bolts, and washers. All speed restrictions were lifted prior to opening day. It took us until April 5th to get it all done. Add into that we had the Kallas' popsicles to dump. Chicago rail car called their 5 ballast cars back. Unfortunately for us, they were still frozen. So with a lot of help from the Diesel department we thawed and dumped the cars.

We still have some work to do, but will get that done before operations or under traffic.

During the winter Andy and I spent quite a bit of time trying to get machines ready for service for this year. Unfortunately when we did a big barn switch to get machines out, the Tamper decided it had not received enough attention. She did not want to fire up. With the help of Wes Lloyd we were able to get her started, but she promptly started to spew out antifreeze. Looks like out newly rebuilt engine needs some more work. That will be taken out over the weekend of April 12th and sent back.