The Brookins Collection

"Let me tell you a story...."

Back in 1962, when the CA&E was being scrapped and the preserved cars were being prepared for shipment by various museums, Gerry Brookins purchased a large collection of blueprints and other documents from the Wheaton shops and took them back to North Olmsted as part of his collection.  They stayed with Trolleyville until the collection was broken up in 2010, as we documented at the time.  Along with the cars, there was a vast array of parts of all sorts, including photos and documents.  Unavoidably, some of this material was rather randomly distributed, and the Northern Ohio Railway Museum wound up with four large boxes of blueprints from Wheaton.

And since they have no CA&E cars to fix, and no particular connection to the line, they have now donated all this material to us.  This is a fantastic treasure trove of historical information.  There are blueprints of every type of part the railroad ever used: bolts, axles, wheels, motor shafts, window frames, bearings, third rail shoes, pneumatic sleet scrapers, tools, equalizers, springs, frame parts, heater blocks... you get the idea.

There are also a good number of electrical diagrams, which are always useful.  It's not easy to get some of the larger diagrams digitized to show all the details clearly, but I've been adding them to my MU circuit collection.  And there are even some diagrams from the North Shore.

And just as a special treat for you, the reader, we can show a few pictures of the blueprints, chosen from the hundreds available.  You will notice, of course, that the larger prints have gotten folded and refolded over the years, so they don't lie flat.  But on the whole they're still in very good condition.

There's relatively little dealing with the wood cars, as it happens.  Not too surprising, I suppose.  But the steel cars are well documented, particularly the Cincinnati cars.  The most impressive drawing is this magnificent plan, which measures 29" x 60".

And then there's a cross-section:

For the wood cars, at least there's this nice plan of the steel underframe for the 1902 cars, showing details of the underbody equipment in later years:

So if anybody else out there happens to have one of the 1902 cars, this might be useful.

Finally, everything you need to make yourself a brass "trombone" whistle!

We cannot thank the Northern Ohio Railway Museum enough for this material.  It will be a valuable part of IRM's already vast library holdings.  They have also provided us with useful information about the cars in our collection that operated on Shaker Heights -- the 306, the Cleveland PCC, and the 18.  This is inter-museum cooperation at its finest.