Illinois Railway Museum Blog

I am going to post these under the Wood Shop title rather than create many posts with perhaps only a single image for that topic.  The heat was withering again, at or above 100F so breaks were frequent and work moved inside our shops.

CGW X 38

Jim Leonard is beside the Russel plow and you can see work has progessed on the needlechipping and priming of the car body.  Dick Cubbage and Kirk Warner have helped on this.  For this project we continued to fabricate new framing timbers to replace those lost or damaged inside the body.

MILW X 5000

Buzz Morisette has taken on assisting those working on the dynamometer car and here is seen trying to lay out some curved wood framing for inside the car.

MILW X 5000

The engineering was successful and here Buzz is bandsawing the new stringers.

Motormans Seat

Work continues 'beneath the radar' on many projects and here John McKelvey has just finished reupholstering a new motorman's seat cushion.  The restored frame is beside him on the table.  I believe this is destined for Shaker Heights Rapid Transit 63, a relatively recent PCC car arrival.

CTS 4223

Dave Rogan and Rich Witt are at the table saw creating new white oak parts for a fuse box to be mounted on the roof of this PCC car.

CA and E 36

Whenever there are a few spare minutes, Al Reinschmidt turns to the task of restoring a door for CA&E 36.  From the progress made, he has spent significant 'spare minutes' on the work.

Work continues on the snow plow restoration, lately working to replace wood framing and timbers inside the car body.  This allows some relief from the withering heat, as the woodworking is done inside the shop.

Lintel

John Faulhaber is working on the table saw with our sled jig to hog out material and result in new tenons on each end of this timber.  It is a lintel, for the right hand doorway on the plow, the horizontal piece that helps frame the opening.

Door Frame

With the lintel done, Buzz Morisette, John, and myself did a dry fit of all the parts on the workbench.  This is an assembly that has to be put together first before installing in the car.  Of course it fit perfectly (after two or three trips back and forth to trim up shoulders, etc).  Henry Vincent helped start the boring process for the ten holes to mount it.