Illinois Railway Museum Blog

Tack Molding

Randy Hicks and Eddie Pszczolkowski set up the router early in the morning and proceeded to mill out several passes to produce new upper tack molding for Chicago Aurora & Elgin 319.

Ad Panels

Lorne Tweed continued the work on Cleveland Transit System 4223.  The metal curved panels for the interior, which held ad cards, have all been cleaned of old paint and rust.  Lorne applied primer to the last of them, and also some finish paint by the end of the day.

A Survivor

We are resuming work on wood parts for our Pennsylvania Railroad 476199 caboose.  Here is one of the cupola windows which was judged sound, but had beading split off on the bottom rail.  John Faulhaber crafted a new piece of wood after routing away the bad part.  It is epoxied in place and will save us the work of making an entirely new window.

Jointing

Bill Peterson is jointing some new stock for passenger department windows.  Our jointer is the first step in making almost anything if the wood is not true and straight.  Carefully operated, with attention to the way the grain is running, it will eliminate warping, twisting, bowing, and other such defects.  It does this on one surface only which then becomes the reference surface for subsequent steps.  Of course some of the wood is removed in these steps and you may end up with stock that is undersized.  So it is important to do this step first before planing and ripping to size.

Priming

Victor Humphreys was priming new lumber destined for the ceiling on our Chicago Great Western X 38 snowplow.  On bad weather days we do this work in the shop, and enough material is now primed and stockpiled so we will be able to reach the halfway point of the new ceiling in the plow.

Shop Tools

None of the tools in our wood shop are brand new, in fact many at the century mark or older.  They are of a time when designs were robust, but nothing lasts forever.  Buzz Morisette and Rich Witt were reassembling reconditioned parts for our J C Wright bandsaw.  As soon as it was done, three new jobs were processed as folks awaited its return to service.