Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Back In the Saddle Again

Joel Arndt is making some new saddles for the CA&E 460.  These are 'temporary' in nature to allow the roof and trolley base area to be serviceable.

Get a Handle on It

Tim Peters continues the major restoration project on CRT 1268.  He has been removing seat handles, stripping years of paint and crud, buffing them back to bright brass, and clear coating them, as seen here.

Station Door

We are in the beginning stages of a new Wood Shop project.  Here you see an old and decrepit door on our depot.  There are seven other doors of a different panel design and layout so we presume this was a stand in or replacement door installed maybe 40 years ago after the depot came to Union.  It has definitely seen better days.

Better Door

Here you see an example of the more 'standard' type of door design in use and found in our depot.  I say 'better' with some reservations but certainly better from the standpoint of being period accurate and more consistent.  So the plan is to try to construct and fabricate a new door, determine the designs, and effort to reproduce this design.  In the future some of the other doors may also see replacement.

Sawing

Here Jeff Brady makes some carefully fitted piece to continue on the ME 28 doors.  I thought I would sneak this into the wood shop report to avoid another entry with only this pic for the ME 28.

Lots of Windows

Dick Lukin was out to help on several projects.  Here he is holding one of the newly sanded window frames (done on our Berlin sander) and a stack of frames already squared off.  These are now essentially complete - all 12 new frames needed for the CA&E cars.

Seat Frame

Dick also applied a primer coat to a spare seat frame to fit our TM 972 streetcar.  The rest of the story - we are now getting all the seats for the interior reupholstered.  This frame will go to the contractor's shop on loan so they may check that each piece is correct and will work once back and installed in the 972.  Victor Humphreys worked long and hard on this project all day removing cushions and backs from the car, and many others helped along the way.  That included Frank Sirinek, Mike Stauber, Bill Moran, Rich Witt, Henry Vincent, and others I probably forgot.

And Rich Witt and Ralph Huber pitched in on a Track Department 'order' from Adam Robillard.  We sure cut up a lot of plywood and 2x4's for a unit to store parts.

Oh, did I mention that Buzz Morisette has done some preliminary work to get a MILW herald on our URTX 26640 car, and that he was sanding and continuing glazing and paint work on new windows for the MILW 01984 caboose?