Illinois Railway Museum Blog

I am very late to post this entry and was wondering if I owe you an apology.  It just seems that there is a lot going on in my IRM life and I have been really busy.  The other lame excuse is that I can blame the weather.  This weekend will be the first scheduled day of railroad operations at IRM for 2013.

The connection there is that this will be a short report.  There were six (or more) of our regular Wednesday volunteers working on a large 'switch move'.  The name is just like what it sounds.  One car at a time, one track at a time cars were being moved from several barns to be rearranged from their winter storage locations to be operator friendly.  That is so the deck of cards will not have to be shuffled by the regular operators, often needing a small diesel and towbars, to get the scheduled car out and ready to run in the morning.  That meant fewer folks working in the relative comfort of our shop areas.

Raising Panels

Work continued on the new door we are building for our station.  Victor Humphreys, Dave Rogan, and Jim Leonard have a tricky set of jigs in position to do an operation to produce 'raised panels'.  There are four solid panel inserts in this new door and first we planed, ripped, and crosscut them to size.  One of the long ones is being passed through the table saw to thin that panel around the edges, on both sides.  All done and now for cleanup and hand sanding.

The Grid Shop

Pete Galayda continues to work to reassemble the many resistance grids boxes for the Charles City Western 300 steeple cab locomotive.  He and John Nelligan have worked many weeks on this phase of the restoration, it must seem like forever to them.

Pulley

Jim Foraker is working to restore a drive pulley for the new (old) table saw restoration.  It is a paper pulley that was beginning to show wear and was de-laminating.  Here, new epoxy is being poured into a mold to consolidate and repair it.

That is right I said PAPER PULLEY.  They were fairly common a hundred or more years ago on wood working machines driven by flat leather belts.  On this one many, many layers of paper were stacked up (maybe 1500 or so) and then compressed and riveted into a sandwich.  Seems to have been very workable, but nothing lasts forever.

Steel

Jim is moving a new steel delivery into the shop, having been helped by Victor Humphreys.  These pieces will be cut to our design, welded into a frame and painted to be ready to mount that beast of a cast iron table saw upon.

Other work included more puzzle solving for parts for the interior of Cleveland Transit System 4223, and a two man crew - Jeff Brady and Norman Krentel - working on the roof for Michigan Electric 28.