A Visit From CERA

On Saturday, the Central Electric Railfans Association visited IRM. For the occasion, we brought out a trio of cars they had expressed an interest in, and each made a round trip. Neither my father nor I were out on Saturday, but fortunately Zach Ehlers and Bill Wulfert have both sent in some photos of the festivities. We'll start with Zach's collection.

The 319 stands at 50th to load passengers. The CERA folks brought along that neat "drumhead" style metal sign, which I believe is pretty historic in its own right. For whatever reason, it was designed to hang on a CA&E headlight bracket, but had to be chained up on the other cars.

The 1754 was, of course, a highlight. It looks gorgeous next to the matching elevated station.

And the 160 was popular, too, having just been released back into revenue operation with a fully restored interior one week previous.

The 160 made a photo stop at the Seeman Road platform, shown here. Zach served as conductor on all three trips, while Joel - visible at right - was motorman. Other shop guys were in charge of switching cars around so that the next car out was always ready to go.

Another shot of the 160. Joel pointed out that in its final years, the North Shore was subject to "headlights on, day or night" rules, but the CA&E went out before those took effect and never ran with headlights in the daytime.

And then we have a collection of photos from Bill Wulfert:

It was Bus Day on Saturday, in addition to being the occasion of a CERA visit, so several trolley buses and a couple of motor buses were in operation. Here, the 1754 is staged on the 50th Avenue west track with the Milwaukee Marmon-Herrington parked alongside Railroad Avenue in the background. With the completion of repainting work on CTA 9631, the next trolley bus in line for professional exterior restoration is this one: Milwaukee 441. A group of generous donors is funding this imminent effort.

The 1754 passes the substation on the return from its mainline trip.

One of our oldest 'L' cars, the 1754, sits across the platform from a pair of our newest, the 2200s.

The 1754 was fully decked out with markers, and of course wore the CERA roundel in its turn.