Visit to Mid-Continent

Over the weekend, it was time for another visit to the car shop of the Mid-Continent Railway Museum  in North Freedom.  My old friend Bill Buhrmaster gave us a nice guided tour.  And these are just three of the current projects.

LS&I 64

The crew at North Freedom are making noteworthy progress on the LS&I Hicks car.  The roof has been finished, and from the ground it looks great.  But the scaffold has been removed, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  In any case, you can follow some of the developments on this car over the years by looking at the Trip Reports for Wisconsin.

Bill pointed out something I'd never noticed before: one of the iron platform railings has a slot, which is visible here:

Bill advanced the theory that this slot is for the uncoupling lever of a Miller Hook coupler!  But why?  A car built in 1910 would never have had such a thing.  Evidently the Hicks company would salvage parts when they rebuilt or scrapped older passenger cars, and store them for later use.  So this railing could possibly date back to the 1870's or so.  He also pointed out that the pedestals on the trucks are similar in size and shape, but they all have different names cast into them, and so the trucks were assembled from whatever spare parts happened to be lying around.  I didn't bother to start taking pictures of the different pedestals.

But a complete restoration of the interior is well underway.   

A lot of the woodwork needs to be reproduced.  Much of it has rotted away over the years.

Finally, they have recreated one of the original F.M. Hicks company seats -- double lever flipovers -- from original drawings and surviving parts, since most of them were replaced long ago in the car's history.  It looks great and works perfectly.  Now they just have to produce a car's worth.

DULUTH

This is a wooden sleeper built by Barney & Smith in 1902.  For over 80 years, though, it served as a summer cottage and is now being slowly restored.  One section was retained more or less intact, while the others were demolished, so at least they have a pattern for rebuilding the rest of the interior.

EJ&S 2

The East Jordan & Southern #2 is one of the oldest passenger cars in existence in the US, having been built originally in 1864 by Osgood Bradley.  Its restoration is now complete.  It's on display, and Bill sent me these official before and after pictures.

In the early days at North Freedom, this car was often used in revenue service.

To me, the interesting thing here is that under the piles of parts you can clearly see the CA&E walkover seats from car 300.  They certainly weren't authentic, so they were sold to IRM several years ago and are used to repair and replace seats in the 308 and 309.

The interior has been completely rebuilt.  The ceiling patterns are painted on canvas attached to the ceiling.  New seats were manufactured.