Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Frank and I were out today, naturally Frank was out Way before me though. Good thing because he installed the new radio in the Amtrak brushcutter where the old Amtrak one was mounted. Everything is installed ready to go minus the power to the unit. Nice work for sure.

I arrived after lunch with the intention of getting the wine car parts unloaded from the UP hopper from California... Nick asked nicely. Frank had gone over the Model 50 earlier topping off fluids and repairing a tranny leak he found coming off the main pump. seems a lock nut was loose and was leaking at high RPM's. gonna have to keep an eye on that one. Frank was today's crane operator and his luck doesn't seem to be improving when it comes to travel mode. He was able to get it to move one direction but not the other. He found that pivoting the boom one way or the other made it function which tells us the contacts on the swivel post are dirty or corroded... After a while it worked fine so Frank said he'll clean up the contacts and hope that solves the problem.

We picked up the UP hopper on station 2 and dragged it over to the steam leads where we picked out the 2 complete freight car trucks, coupler, diesel loco foot boards and steam loco firebox from the car. The car by the way, still has half a load of 20 year old coal in it. Thanks to Jim W and Dan M for running the USA8537 for the day. After lifting the trucks from the car, Jim W pulled the car out and Frank lowered the truck to the ground where Nick was ready with the forklift to move the trucks to Yard 10. Everything went smoothly including the unloading of the 1800's steam locomotive firebox that came along.

To wrap up the day Jim, Frank and I dug the EJ&E 529 caboose out from 100 track and put it in Yard 11 for us to use with the Burro crane. The heat does work and I imagine we'll use it this winter.

All in all it was a good day.

Adam Robillard