Night Train to Kishwaukee Grove

Frank writes...

It's been almost 10 years since IRM started running trains into the evening on Labor Day Weekend - I had to check, but the first year we did this was 2015 - and it's still a blast. This year, the CA&E wood cars were the "evening shift" train on Saturday. For most of the shift, my father was conductor and I was motorman.

We brought the train out at about 4:00pm, but had a bit of a wait on the tail track while a spot opened up in the rotation.

Fortunately, as you can see above, the train watching from this spot is pretty nice! Daytime service was held down by the 1630 with the coach train, Minnesota Transfer 200 (later replaced by CB&Q 504) with a caboose train that also added a couple of freight cars behind the engine, and the CA&E steel cars on the main line; Northwestern Elevated 24 working the 50th Avenue shuttle; and Veracruz 19 and the Green Hornet on the car line. All of those except the 1630 and 4391 were put away by dinnertime, but the C&NW bi-level set and, of course, our train came out to replace them.

We neglected to get a formal crew photo, but hopefully Carina Borst will forgive me for stealing a couple of crew photos she snapped when she joined us for our 7:45pm departure. Above, myself and Zach, who joined the crew for the last two trips (we departed on the 45's hourly from 4:45 to 8:45).

Above, my father and Zach on the 7:45 train; my father had to vamoose after this trip and Zach worked the final trip and helped get the train put away. Thank you, Zach!

Here you go, a couple of nice shots of the train in Station Track 1 before the 8:45 trip. We had a good crowd pretty much every trip and everyone seemed to have a good time. We've come up with a good system that involves carrying markers at all four corners and using the little "flippers" to flip them from white to red (or vice versa) when changing ends. We also carry a headlight at each end of the train to make changing ends easier.

Everything ran smoothly this year. We didn't even have any of the kerosene marker lanterns blow out!

So, enough CA&E photos - what else was going on?

When I arrived shortly after lunchtime, a crew was doing B&G work outside the electric car shop. They were working to extend a gas line, and I was told that by the end of the day, the new line was run, just not hooked up. Pictured above, Jimmy on the ground, Facilities GM Dave Diamond in the hole, Nathan taking measurements, and new volunteer Ashton supervising.

During the day, before switching to join the CA&E crew as conductor, Zach was running NWERR 24 on the 50th Avenue-to-Jefferson Street shuttle. Here, the car comes into the 'L' station from one of its trips. This car truly is one of the most spectacular pieces of equipment we run and it's terrific to see it in operation.

And here we have the second bunch of seats for the CA&E curve-siders! For some reason, this batch didn't arrive "bagged," so we're going to pick up some garbage bags to protect them until they can be installed in the 460, which hopefully will only be a matter of weeks or months. This means that all of the full-width cross seats for the first car have been reupholstered; Jon is picking up the last half dozen or so seats, which are the slightly narrower seats that go against the bulkheads, on Tuesday and taking them to the upholstery shop. Exciting progress!