Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Yesterday we hosted five visitors from the Itasca Park District and showed them our restored Milwaukee Road caboose.  It became sort of a workshop/clinic/seminar as we related many of the obstacles encountered and the choices we made along the restoration path.  Victor Humphreys and Buzz Morisette were the real stars of the effort which included a 'field trip' to Barn 11.  THANKS!!  So I really had little time for shop work and photos.  Nevertheless the able shop crew turned out a lot of work.

Door Bottom

First out of the gate, Dave Rogan executed fourteen mortises in the door parts for a new door in our depot.  Here, Dave Diaz and Jim Leonard are shown with the bottom rail, cleaning out chips and doing the layout work for the tenons.

Assembly

Near the end of the day, Paul Cronin, Jim and Dave had done a lot of the fussy work to trim and fit each of six of the joints and we were able to dry assemble those members into what now what was starting to look like a new door.

Mortising

The set up and the tooling on our mortising machine was changed over and Rich Witt and Dave Rogan are plunging the mortises for two new windows for the Boston & Maine 1094 passenger car.

Stiles

Rich and Dave show off the results in the odd shaped stiles for the above windows.  These are to be round topped and the thinking behind these pieces is a bit different from the more typical railroad sash we have made.

Ribs

Buzz was back in the shop in the afternoon and was producing more roof ribs for the private car ELY.

More Door Work

Henry Vincent makes more progress every week on the repairs to a train door for Chicago Aurora & Elgin 36.  Still one more wood piece to make this week, and then a lot of additional parts to be cleaned, painted, and installed.  An interesting feature is that this door has provision for the hang on headlight when on the front of a train.  So there is wiring in a channel through the wood door framing to the metal bracket, for two wires. 

Roof Panels

Norm Krentel and Jeff Brady went a field trip to a local supplier and picked up a load of new plywood panels destined for a new roof on Michigan Electric 28.  They were busy prime painting those for much of the day remaining.  In the shop some of our crew produced about 70 thin slats of poplar, to be used on the front bonnet of the car roof, much as Jeff and Norm have completed for the rear car roof.