Frank writes...
These are excerpts from a tape recorded interview I did with Bob Bruneau on December 3, 2003. I've edited out my questions and some content not relevant to the interview.
[I joined IRM in] 1956
because we got the IT cars. I came up with the money for the 101. I said I'd
[also] donate a hundred dollars. Then they tried to cheat me out of another
hundred dollars. They said "You said two hundred dollars!" …Our car
[the 277] fell apart on the P&PU [Peoria & Pekin Union]. It was running
“rear end of train only;” they pulled the front coupler out. [We asked:]
"How'd you do that?" [They said:] "Well, it's not very strong,
they only had 67 cars behind it!" It has a wood frame. So at
Well I worked on 101 a lot. Borrowed two tarps off of small trailers. In my
stupidity. Trailers used to be round on the end. A lot of the trailers in those
days were open-top; they just had car lines. And there's pictures - I don't
have them - of 101 [that] says "Weber Cartage" on both ends. [Laughs]
I think I worked on 415 because it didn't have any mothers. Ray Neuhaus was the
President, I think. We sandblasted the 277 and painted it. Between the inner
and outer windows was full of sand and finally I talked him into letting me
work on that - [getting] the sand out. It was all wet sand, it stayed wet on
the window sills. They had one of these big Coke tanks, you know, when you put
your money in there and then they release a gate to slide your bottle around
and pull it out. And the water was always green and slimy in there. And they
had a drain cock on the thing; you had to fill it up with buckets, and it was a
real loose one, trying to pick the kind of pop you wanted out of there.
Somebody would bump the drain cock with their leg, and you'd walk by the car
and it's leaking water out of the floor. So when I really - when we were moving
[to Union], I got a couple of my buddies, and I can't remember who they were,
and pitched it out the baggage door onto the ground. Help pay for the move. In
the front of 277 on days like this when it was snowing, snow would blow in
under the inside wall around the front. So I had a guy, Mattie Dalvo, from the
North Shore, and all we had was a little table saw. How are you going to cut
this part, with a quarter-round on the front? "Oh, that's easy," he
says. He just takes the thing [makes sweeping motion with hands] RRRRROOOWW,
tipped it right on 45 degrees, RRRRROOOWW - and there it was! A big
block of wood with a radius on it, angled. I mean, it's crude as hell, I
caulked the hell out of it.
…Odinius - he was a practical joker. And Bob Selle was working on the Singer
engine that's down at Noblesville, and so Odinius gets me over by the
Three-Spot, which was a sweeper body, double-truck sweeper body with a big door
in the middle. That was the company shop. There wasn't much room in there. So
he [Odinius] says "When I nod my head, unplug the cord. When I nod it
again, plug it back in." [I ask:] "What's going on?" [Odinius
says:] "Just do it and don't let anybody see you." So Selle's about
75 feet away with a couple of extension cords drilling holes. Howard nods his
head so I unplug the thing. Bob looks around, checks the cords, yeah, they're
all plugged in; [he] didn't come in the Three-Spot. Howard nods his head;
[Selle] goes back, tries the electric drill, it runs. He starts drilling the
hole again and he [Howard] nods his head again and I unplug it. And he's
[Selle's] looking around - "What the f---'s going on?" Howard's got
the extension cord like a garden hose, you know, folded in half, and the guy
thinks he's - "Cut that out, Howard!" "What, what?"
"You're cutting off my electricity!" He nods his head: "I
am?" He lets go of the cord and I plug the thing in and it runs and then
he nods and we do it again! I had to unplug it and the guy was going nuts! The
other one was Jim Fox, he'd always like to play tricks on him. Especially in
the restaurant, there was a strip there with all sailors and we'd go in there
for lunch. Odinius would always get a dinner; it was a typical Greek restaurant.
They always had peas, and Howard would always try and sit in the booth next to
one of the Foxes. He'd take his spoon and he'd be shooting peas all the time! So
Fox decided, "Well, I'll sit next to him and he can't do that to me any
more." So Howard would be talking, stirring his coffee - and he had real
hot coffee - and he's just talking, put his spoon on Jim's arm -
"YEOW!" They had these hand-towel machines in there, you know, pull
the towel down and dry your hands. One day some guys come walking in, towel
machines under their arms, and we heard "crash, boom, bang!" And they
walk out with no towel machines. The owner's all "bliblibliblibli" -
Greek. They smashed the two towel machines off the wall and put their towel machines
in, you know, the mob was still into all this. They'd just come in and blast
the other towel guys' machines to smithereens off the wall, big holes in the plaster,
and put their machines on. Now you had to buy from them! Next step was getting
your legs broken or something.
[Regarding the move to Union:] Yeah, I didn't ride the trains but I, being out
of work, and because of the move, I was there six days a week and I'd go back
from Union Sunday night with whoever's going back to Chicago and then I'd
recover for a day and Tuesday morning I'd hop the North Western back to
Downey's and walk to the Museum. I built three ramps for the different cars;
eight streetcars. Tore up track, sanded journals. We had an air line from the
[CHF] factory that came out, inch and a quarter pipe, and the three wood
baggage cars we had he [Frank Sherwin] gave us; some of that was just the right
length, you know - taking the air line apart on the ground and screwing it into
the car! Stopped the leaks. Junked a lot of stuff - roaring fires there [North
Chicago] all the time. We got two electric locomotives from [Commonwealth]
Edison, and two cranes, and two gons full of parts. To pay for the move, I had
to scrap stuff. I sent brand new traction motors to scrap that were still in
boxes. That hurt. We had a little wooden
I don't remember if there was four or five trains [going to Union]. But you had
to do all the figuring out, you know. Go from MCB coupler to an MCB adapter to
plug into a Van Dorn car and then a Van Dorn to a Tomlinson on the 431, and
back to a Van Dorn and back to an MCB. See, there's some "L" cars in
there plus the 309. [The 321 got a drawbar pulled out] right here in Union, by
our interchange. A hose burst when they made a brake application - the back
half of the train stopped and the front half kept going, for a little bit. The
diesel didn't stop as fast. I forget what we did, how we got that off the
railroad. Well, what happened, to move out here we bought a bunch of ties from
the
We had to be out of [North Chicago] by the first of July. So the streetcars
weren't out, but all the rest of it was - well, not all the rest of it. Sherwin
- the stuff Sherwin owned, he didn't give it to us right away. Three baggage
cars, the North Western cupola caboose, and the 218 box motor.
Two of the "L" cars had Stearns & Ward [couplers] and two of them
had Van Dorns, so those were all right to adapt to. We'd have a Van Dorn on
each end of the Stearns & Ward. Yeah, people that rode the trains, you
know, some people that didn't work could be train guards. A can of journal oil,
and hotbox sticks, and air hoses. You'd see that s--- going by, you know - a
steam engine and the "Ely", "L" cars and all this goofy
stuff, no cabooses on the back. Well the first thing out here was the
Yeah, it was [the 1002]. We also had to put reporting marks on all the cars. So
1002 became UTC 12 - Union Traction Company. The North Western caboose was
10494, so I did a neat paint job - but if you add that up it's 18. So if you
put "18" down you didn't have to put five numbers on each side! They
didn't care what numbers they were. And I had an argument with the North Western
inspector - he wasn't going to admit the
[Outside the fence,] that was boot camp there; the sailors would challenge us,
you know - "What are you doing out here?" [We'd respond:] "What
are you doing on our railroad?" "Well, I don't know, they told me to
watch the fence." I said, "Well watch it! And don't get run
over!" We even had the air conditioner working on the 277. We threw a
stinger over the fence - just kept throwing it until the bare wire went over
the trolley wire. I think we had a couple of track bolts tied onto the end of
the wire. I've got a picture of [Dave] Shore standing in the doorway of 1797.
We ran the 431 up there.
[Regarding a plan to run CA&E 431 on the North Shore:] Odinius even made an
adapter coupler. Frank Beshak, the guy who still comes out, said "That's
better than any car we got out here on our railroad." Mason says "You
ain't running any of your s--- on our railroad." And he was right - what
if it broke down? It's got goofy couplers on it; you don't know anything about
it. You know, if you were a minute late when you got in on a run, you had to
have a good reason why you were late. [They were] really sticklers about that.
They weren't gonna take the chance. If you had a derailment or something… There
were plans of running the 65 too. They had a TM fan trip that was 1121 and
another car; no, just 1121. [It was a] single-end car and the ventilators on
the clerestory are kind of [slanted] things towards the back end of the car. So
when they wyed it at South Upton, they're going the other way and all the s---
comes blowing in on everybody! This was a one-way ventilator, you know, so
instead of exhausting the stale air it's sucking it all in! Everybody's covered
with stuff.
News and views of progress at the Illinois Railway Museum
Thursday, February 16, 2017
An Interview with Bob Bruneau
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3 comments:
From the Trolley Bus Dept.: The urinal was 192. 193 was at ERHS. R. W. Schauer
Here at Hicks Car Works we are dedicated to getting the important historical facts exactly correct. As you may have noticed.
We should also point out that Dick Lukin was instrumental in getting the 101 and 277 ready for shipment. He too drove down to Peoria to help Bob, and they worked day and night to secure the cars.
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