Illinois Railway Museum Blog

The Martians Have Landed

Well, not exactly.  Here you see Randall Hicks working to sand old finish off of some original CA&E 319 windows.  Who knows what is in that old stuff?  He is a smart man to use precautions and 'suit up' with protective gear.

Dr Frankensteins Laboratory

In this case Dr. Nelligan's Laboratory as John continues his quest to decipher a rat's nest of untagged and undocumented wiring on the Charles City Western 300.  Here he is focusing on the headlight circuits.  He is testing resistance values in a box full of resistors to drop voltage to the headlights themselves.  The switches in the cab seem to be wired for two positions - bright and dim - but the headlights themselves are a carbon arc design (no bulb).  None of us youngsters have had much experience with carbon arc headlights.  The electrodes touch together when not energized, and after connecting the circuit it seems a magnetic coil pulls the electrodes apart to establish or 'strike' the arc.  There is one preset gap and as the carbon rods burn away in use, they can be extended.

But how does a bright/dim setting work with a carbon arc?  Is brightness proportional to voltage, even though the length of the arc is fixed mechanically?

Switch Engine

After lunch Gerry Dettloff helped out by moving the old CB&Q shop car a few feet west.  A heavy chain and the Bobcat did the trick after some planning and set up.  It worked as we envisioned and was over and done almost before you noticed.  The shop car had to move west to open up a gap between that and the CB&Q silver baggage car under restoration.  A number of body repairs have been completed on both sides and on the east end.  But space for scaffolding was needed to access the west end, which area still awaits our practitioner of the black art of metalworking.

We spent some time making air brake repairs to a caboose, ICG 199458, completing installation of a new air hose on the east end, and struggling quite a while to remove a defective angle cock on the west end.

Henry Vincent did some more painting in the new shop addition on Barn 4 and helped to begin installation of some fine antique woodworking vises in the shop.