Illinois Railway Museum Blog

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

I would like to wish all our members, friends, and supporters a Happy Thanksgiving.  That would extend especially to our volunteers, shop workers, and restorationists who work year around freely giving of their time.  What a great crew of guys.  THANK YOU!!!  We had a light turnout yesterday in the shops, and the weather was really too cold to work outdoors.  But several diehards came out and made some progress on many projects.

Big Tank Car

I will start out with a current photo of the largest tank car in our collection, Great Northern X-1390.  We managed to get it repainted this fall and have begun the lettering.  It is fairly unusual in the orange dome and patch on the tank shell.  Presumably this made it easier for yard crews to pick it out from a sea of tank cars.

Windows

John Faulhaber is trimming all the top and bottom rails for new windows to exactly the same length.  Then he made stop cuts for tenons (144 cuts) on the top and bottom rails of new passenger car windows that he and Paul Cronin are making.  In the morning we went over the engineering drawings and they measured and marked for all the mortises to be drilled into the stiles.  Victor Humphreys and I continued work on new cupola windows for our Pennsylvania Railroad four wheel wood caboose.  We completed the mortising and have done the rough fitting on the first of the new frames.

Headlight

Norm Krental was busy working on a headlight for Michigan Electric 28.  With the new canvas roof completed and painted, maybe we can all look forward to seeing the headlight restored and mounted on the front roof of the car.

Trolley Boards

Let the sparks fly!!  Incredible as it seems Jeff Brady is working to dis-assemble a set of roof boards for the Michigan Electric 28.  The car probably last ran over 75 years ago and yet here is an original set of these.  True, the saddles are pretty much rotted away or broken, but some other parts may be able to be saved (that is their plan and they sticking to that story).  So the rusted bolts are being cut away and thus the nice rooster tail of sparks flying against a temporary shield.