Illinois Railway Museum Blog

I will group all this under the wood shop banner this time, although of course activity encompassed many different projects.  We will start with work related to our Chicago Great Western X 38 snowplow.

Headlight

This is the headlight donated by one of our members and it is now completely restored and painted.  Looks good, doesn't it?  Now if we had a few weeks of warm weather, it could be installed on the plow.

Mortising

Victor Humphreys is standing at the mortising machine as we plunge 3/8 inch wide slots into the stile of the new windows we are making.  Not done with all of them yet, more work for the Wednesday crew.  These parts are also for the X 38.

Planing

Victor and Buzz Morisette are working at our planer to size new lumber for the work Buzz is doing to repair the roof structure in our Private Car ELY.  This is an 1889 Pullman product with a long history on the railroads AND at IRM.

Next Steps

With the wood properly sized, Buzz moved on to shape new roof ribs (carlines) and here is making a brace to hold them in place during installation.

The Scheme of Things

Eric Lorenz was studying newly arrived electrical schematics to work out details of the Shaker Heights 63 PCC car.  That car was built as a single car by St Louis Car Co for Minneapolis but when it went to Ohio, they converted it to be able to run in multiple unit with their other PCC's.  They made it work, now we have to figure out how, and probably take it back as a single car without the MU feature.  We have no other MU cars to run with it, and it becomes more complex and harder to maintain.

Many other volunteers were busy, including a crew decorating CTA 6000 cars for the upcoming Holiday Train, and a switch move to bring Chicago Rapid Transit 1024 to the west end of Barn 4, Track 42, for restoration work.  That car was built by Pullman in 1898 as car 24 for the Northwestern Elevated and came to IRM in 1958.