We have big news about our CA&E collection. Car 321, which has been owned by IRM since it was purchased from the railroad in 1962, will be leaving for greener pastures. The car has been deaccessioned and donated to the Village of Villa Park, which will be putting it on display next to the original CA&E Ardmore station. Formal arrangements have only recently been finalized, which is why we haven't posted about this earlier. The car is scheduled to be moved soon, but the date hasn't been set.
CA&E 321 in 2009
Why is the 321 going to Villa Park? The reason is that we firmly believe it is in the best interest of the car, and of historic preservation and education overall. In Villa Park, the car will be housed under a specially build shelter and will be cosmetically restored. It will be seen by tens of thousands of people a year - and will be located on "home rails," so to speak, the only Chicago-area interurban car to be preserved where it ran every day in service. In contrast, at IRM, the car would likely just sit forever in a closed-off barn. It is a duplicate in the collection, it's incomplete, and its body is in very poor shape. It would likely take north of $1 million to restore the car, and there are dozens of other pieces in the collection that even we CA&E fans say would be better uses for funding at that level.
The Villa Park proposal includes a shelter for the 321 patterned loosely after this one.
We've also kept in mind that the 321 was originally purchased from the railroad by IRM members, not by the museum itself. It was donated to IRM for the purpose of being a parts source for other cars - chiefly the Milwaukee Electric interurban cars. The 321 already contributed its trucks and motors to the 319 back in 2010 (this also permitted us to put the 409 into service), and since it will be a static display piece in Villa Park, our volunteers have removed other electrical and mechanical components for use in the restoration and maintenance of our fleet. Besides being beneficial to our collection without impacting the 321's future use, this also aligns with the aims of the car's original donors.
The car has been in Barn 4 for the past few weeks for removal of electrical equipment and preparation for transportation off-site.
We realize not everyone will agree with sending the 321 to Villa Park, but we hope that even the skeptics will give the folks there a chance. We paid a visit to the 321's future display site, where the village has already built a short piece of track right next to the Ardmore station. It's a very nice area, with a bandshell a few feet to the west, a new condo building down the block, and a busy meadery across the street (I didn't know what that was, but it's like a winery, but for mead - you learn something new every day!). And, of course, there's the bike path on the old CA&E alignment. There are other cities, from Lynwood, Washington, to Corsicana, Texas, that have had interurban cars on display under shelters like this for decades. We hope that the 321 will prove even more popular and visible than the cars in those locales.
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