Sunday Report

Frank writes…

My focus in Sunday was doing more needle-chipping in the 451. I know, this is getting pretty repetitive, but the good news is that the end of the needle-chipping is in sight.

I completed most of the #2 end bulkhead, as shown above, as well as about half the remaining window posts in the main compartment. Once I do the remaining posts, the only areas left to chip will be the top bulkhead panel (after I trace the car number) and a few sections of advertising card rack. I may leave those rack sections in place, though; even if we overcoat them, it preserves some of the original paint. I'm thinking it over.

During one of my breaks, I happened upon Richard, who was testing out the newer of the two Janesville buses in advance of Bus Day next month. He gave me a lift over to the new Bourne Transit Building at the south end of the property to see the progress there. The most exciting thing to me, I'll have to admit, was our old friend, air compressor wagon AX545. Dan has removed the wheels, and he and some of the other shop guys have started removing the fragments of old solid-rubber tire and cleaning up the cast wheels. These will be shipped to our good friend Paul, on the west coast, who knows of a company there that can put authentic replacement tires on the wheels.

Remember, this work is possible thanks to the generous support of readers like you who donated to the AX545 project! Interested in supporting more of these random one-off projects? Click here for our current get-rich quick scheme fundraising effort.

Of more general interest, Richard had just finished putting up quite a bit of pallet racking. The Bourne Building is capable of holding buses five lanes wide if you park them closely (and we do), but the back half will hold four lanes plus quite a bit of parts storage.

The building isn't full yet, but Richard and his crew are working hard at shifting buses around and loading them in. This unusual lineup features the aforementioned Janesville "no fuss bus" flanked by a CSL White, the older of the Janesville buses, and the Indianapolis trolley bus.

After dinner, I finally installed replacement flag brackets on the open car. It arrived in 2009 with makeshift flag brackets that Trolleyville had fashioned by taking pieces of conduit and beating them flat at one end. Besides looking stupid, these weren't large enough to hold a normal flag "stick." So, here are some legitimate brackets, displaying flags honoring both countries the car has called home. Notes for motormen: first, the flags are in the same location as the handles in a clearly labeled bag, so feel free to use them if you like; and second, per flag code, it does matter which goes on which side! The flags are marked L and R.

Weekend Photo Gallery

Thanks to our intrepid freelance photographer, Steven Jam, who submitted an assortment of photos from this past Sunday.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: the 431, the regular service car for Sunday, is observed by our Metra F40C, spotted on Station Track 2.

Here's a closer shot of the F40C. People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin have gotten quite a bit of rain over the past week. Parts of our main line look a bit like the IT causeway over Lake Decatur.

And now, it's on to an overview of the movement of air compressor wagon AX545 to the bus barn.

Here comes the cavalry! Richard approaches on the ex-FAA airport tug.

The wagon, with Brian pacing in the Mule, heads south down Railroad Avenue (not to be confused with "Business Railroad Avenue" alongside the Steam Shop on the other side of Schneider's Grove). You'll note another lake has sprung up over to the left.

The wagon continues south, this time down the alignment of the future streetcar line extension along Olson Road.

And here it is in its new, albeit temporary, home.

And very nice digs they are! Don't expect to see this building this empty again until, well, ever.

Annual Meeting Weekend

Frank writes...

This past weekend featured a day full of activities on Saturday, with the safety meeting and rules test in the afternoon followed by the annual membership meeting in the evening. Unfortunately I missed the afternoon's festivities, but I did make it to the membership meeting.

One interesting part of the meeting, which took place while the tellers were counting ballots during the board of directors election, was a presentation on the planned Visitor Center and on the capital campaign that is getting underway. Our Event Manager, Tricia (above), one of the leaders of the capital campaign, Mark (below), and Executive Director Marcus Ruef all gave excellent presentations and took questions.

Everyone was cheered by the fact that only one ballot was necessary to elect three board members. The usual congratulations and condolences go out to Marcus Ruef, who was reelected, and to new board members Scott Nauer and Andrew Ossler. Outgoing president Nick Espevik, who went off the board due to term limits, was succeeded by fellow Electric Car Department volunteer Zach Ehlers, who is now the museum's president. Congratulations, Zach!

Glutton for punishment that I am, I was back out at the museum on Sunday. What was it Bob Bruneau used to say concerning the subject of how much time he spent at IRM? "When you're dumb, you suffer!"

I spent much of the afternoon looking through the contactor box under the 319. The goal was to figure out why the car doesn't sequence in parallel. While this isn't necessary for operation, we'd still like to determine what's going wrong.

For future reference, the sequence chart here (the first one, not the "correct" second one) is still what we're seeing. Numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 aren't picking up at all, and 9 isn't picking up until the 10th point. The interlocks all appeared to make, and some (though not all) were tested for continuity. We also tested the connection from the cabinet to #2 interlock, and that wasn't a problem. The next guess is that the lifting coil on 1, 3, or 6 may be bad. I was able to test the coil on contactor 3, and it read okay, but wasn't able to get to the other two. The coils on these DB-260s are hard to access; you need to detach the board on the back of the contactor that holds the interlocks or control resistors, depending on the contactor. Anyway, the next step is probably to test the coils on contactors 1 and 6 at some point. In the meantime, the 319 has been cleared for service (except for lubrication, which needs to be done outside at some point in the next few weeks) and can be moved back home to Barn 8. Many thanks to Brian, Jimmy, and Richard, who helped with this project, and to Nathan, who finished up a lot of the tough inspection work (like motor and roof inspection) on Friday.

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. Or maybe it's just Yard 6. Good Nick hauled this 460 door, which he painted last weekend, over to Yard 6 to compare to the actual car in the sunlight. Unfortunately, for the second time, the color match was noticeably off. We will need to have the paint company come out and color-match the car.

However, we need the 460 in service, so we agreed that the short-term solution is to patch the paint on the doors with "slightly off" red and put them back on the car. Here are the doors ready to be touched up; I sanded and primed the Bondo patch my father had applied to the side door, on the right, to fill a rust hole in the steel sheet.

More exciting things were happening elsewhere. On Saturday, we were notified that the occupancy permit for the new South Storage Building - aka the Bob Bourne Transit Building - had been granted. Richard moved the first bus into the building Saturday after the annual meeting. On Sunday, it was time for everyone's favorite air compressor wagon, AX545, to finally exit the "lean-three" shop. Above, Brian and Richard hook it up to our new-to-us airport tug.

And away they go! This is Richard and Steven on the tug, with Brian following. It was at just this point I got the call to come check paint matches on the 460 door, so I didn't follow AX545 all the way to the new barn.

Fortunately, Brian sent photos of AX545 in its new temporary home. It is not remaining in this barn long-term, but to send its wheels out to get badly needed replacement tires, we need to leave the wagon on blocks for a while. Once the wheels come back repaired, the wagon will leave the Bourne Building.

As you can see, AX545 was the second thing in the new barn after the newer of the two Janesville buses. (Well, I suppose the airport tug was the second thing.) Speaking of new tires, we still need to raise money to get the wheels for AX545 shipped out and re-tired! You can help - click here and donate to the Electric Car Department/Equipment Restoration fund. And don't forget to email us and let us know your donation is to go to AX545!

I spent a few minutes talking with Steve, who was grinding away rusted steel on the Kansas City PCC. I need to trace the front and back outline of the "spitball" along with the car number, since the plan is to strip the paint off the car and repaint it using good-quality paint. Steve revealed that careful examination of a portion of the car that hadn't seen sunlight revealed that the color I painted the 755 back in 2001 was pretty spot-on accurate, so that was nice to hear. We had matched the color to an original sample that, as it turns out, Steve himself had procured from a junkyard somewhere out in Kansas.

Of course, Brian and Will were working on air brake things as usual. While we were looking around for DB-260 stuff, we happened upon some boxes of governor parts, which were forwarded to Brian. Included in the miscellany was this bag of gaskets marked for "700 loco." That would be for 700-series South Shore locomotives, the big ex-New York Central freight locomotives that were cut up in the 1970s. I'm sure this bag made its way to IRM from Michigan City at some point thereafter.

Sunday Miscellany

Frank writes...

It was a busy day in the car shop on Sunday, and it seemed like a lot got accomplished.

My first task after arriving was to put green paint on the rest of the air compressor wagon, as shown here. This included touching up some spots like the safety chains, but did not include the wheels. Hope springs eternal that enough donations will come in to fund replacement of the solid rubber tires, and if that happens, the paint job will be messed up anyway. So, out of an abundance of optimism, we're putting off painting the wheels green. Want to help? Send a check to IRM with "RCAR - for AX545 wheels" on the memo line - and thank you!

I also put a coat of green on some components that had been removed from the AX545, including the two halves of the commutator cover and the two parts of the air strainer (plus the pipe to the air strainer, which was hung in the spray booth). Appeal to whoever removed these parts: can you please reinstall them? Not having removed them myself, I'm not exactly sure how everything goes back. Thank you! Once everything is put back together, the air compressor wagon should be ready to move out of the shop.

After that, I went over and spent some time in the 18. After we confirmed last week that the heat contactor worked, the next step was to test the thermostat itself by letting the car warm up and seeing whether the heat shut off. Rather than sit idly in the car for an hour or two, I figured I may as well paint a couple more seat backs. Above is the "before" view...

...and here's "after." With this, I only have two more seat backs in the back half of the car to paint, and then we can proceed to the front half of the car. The bad news was that the car got quite toasty and the heat never shut off until I manually turned it off, so it looks like the thermostat is not working. At some point, we can remove it and either repair or, if necessary, possibly replace it. It looks like the same kind of thermostat that's on the CA&E curve-siders, and in fact probably dates to very nearly the same era, given that the 18 only acquired electric heat in the mid-1940s.

After dinner, Nick, Joel, and I moved the two third rail beams that have just been completed (or nearly so) onto the "third rail beam cart" out in the barn. Astute viewer that you are, you'll notice that one still needs some black paint, which is why it was left facing outward. These four beams will go onto the 460.

In other exciting news, Zach and the Electroliner crew were able to get the electric markers lit. This is a sight that hasn't been seen in some 60 years! When the 'Liners were built, they used the same kerosene markers as the rest of the fleet. But the North Shore found out that something about the airflow over the train tended to extinguish the markers, so the trains acquired electric markers like the ones shown. When sold to the Red Arrow, they used these markers briefly, but then that line installed permanent markers in steel boxes over the end windows. The 'Liner crew has painstakingly recreated the correct electric markers and they're now wired in. We don't tend to report much on Electroliner happenings, but Zach reports that the restoration team has completed 90% of the work restoring the interior of the A1 car, including seats now reinstalled in the smoker section; they're currently painting the ceiling in the cafe car; and repainting work in the A car is now beginning.

Yet more exciting news: the "mechanical crew" of Jimmy, Will, and Ashtin, with some help at various times (I believe) from Greg and Dan, was able to remove the last wheel from New Jersey Transit 4. Some of the bolts were pretty well stuck, but heating them and then letting them cool did just enough to break the rust that the guys were able to get the bolts out. Once the last full-width tread wheel is installed, the car will be rolled over the pit and the other three traction motors will be tested (the only motor tested so far was, unfortunately, grounded).

Thanks to Brian LaKemper for sending the above and below photos of yet more progress that was made on Sunday. The D13 towed the IT Class B out of the barn so that the replacement air tank could be hoisted into the locomotive, as shown below.

In other news, Richard was making more progress on the rail display; Brian was working on rebuilding feed valves, one of which is intended to go into the 319 (thanks, Brian!!); Greg, Jimmy, and Good Nick were out on the railroad for most of the day doing DC line work that included moving all the hardware from a failing pole near the west end over to the replacement pole; and the "mechanical crew" mentioned earlier, with help from Joel, worked on removing bad bushings from brake beams (say that eight times fast) off the 3142. New bushings are on order. And, of course, Joel was doing various things to organize and rearrange the shop.

Besides all that, there was also a nifty switch move on Saturday. Our hardworking freelance photographer, Bill Wulfert, was on the scene and sent us some photos. We'll have those posted shortly.

Sunday Report

Frank writes…

With HHR firmly in the rear view mirror, Sunday turned out to be more of a normal workday, though Joel was still out for much of the afternoon gathering in Christmas lights. Unfortunately, I failed to take any photos of what was probably my most interesting project for the day: helping Richard diagnose and fix an issue with the 18's heat. The car has electric baseboard heaters that work quite nicely, but the handful of times I've run them, they've never shut off until I manually turn them off. This suggests an issue with either the heat contactor (which is a "fail on" design) or the thermostat.

It turned out that the thermostat fuse wasn't making good contact because the clips were widened out and corroded, so we fixed that and then shorted across the thermostat contacts to confirm the contactor works as it should. Success! The next step will be to testing the thermostat itself, and to do that I'll need to turn the heat on and hang out in the car for a while until it warms up. Hopefully, that will be sometime soon. Thanks to Richard for his work on this little project!

In other news, I put primer on the portions of the CSL air compressor wagon that had been cleaned up by Gregg. These will get a coat of green the next time I'm out. I also put a second coat of white on the lettering, so that's done. Dan F has gotten a quote from a company that can replace the solid rubber tires with authentic rubber replacements. The cost, should we decide to do it, will be $1980 for all four wheels, plus shipping costs. Re-tiring this thing is entirely dependent on donations - without donations specifically for this purpose, the new rubber tires won't happen. If you'd like to see the wheels fixed so AX545 can be towed out for display now and again, send in a check with "RCAR" (Electric Car Department donor-restricted fund) on the memo line and send us an email so we know what you have in mind.

In other news, I spent some time looking for spare parts out in the field, and measured how much extra space there is on Track 84 in case we decide to put AX545 on display at the west end of that track next to the X4 (the answer is about 6-8 feet, or barely enough). But what else was going on?

Richard is back at work on his wintertime project of late, the Barn 8 rail display. Here we see the beneficiaries of his painting activities on Sunday. At right is a piece of rail painted to differentiate the head, web, and base of the rail for educational purposes. The other piece of rail is a real rarity that was discovered in the corner of the Signal Shop, where it had likely been squirreled away years ago by Johnson. It's a piece of pear-head rail dating to 1874 and it's marked for the B&O RR. It turns out that the B&O was one of just two railroads in the mid-1870s that had its own rolling mill for rail, located in Cumberland, Maryland (the other railroad was the Philadelphia & Reading, for what that's worth).

Over in the paint booth were more items for Richard's display. These are examples of - if memory serves - 40-, 60-, 80-, and 100-pound rail, which will be labeled appropriately to demonstrate the variety of sizes in which rail comes.

Out in the barn, Good Nick was taking a break from presidenting to assemble a rebuilt tray of batteries for the CTA 2200s. Here, he's cleaning up threads where the cables attach to the lugs.

I got a chance to speak briefly with Mike S, who is responsible for most of the progress on cleaning up and painting the air compressor wagon. This past week, he painted the entire floor in the 3142 himself, as shown above.

And while the aforementioned 3142 was on the inspection pit, the weekend's "mechanical crew" of Brian, Jimmy, and Will tackled some issues that have cropped up with our most-used streetcar. They removed a couple of levers from the brake rigging, I believe to replace the bushings, and were also looking at some other stuff under the car I'm less sure about. Above, Brian would never look down upon lowly inspection pit workers, but nevertheless he sent the above photo taken of Will looking straight up through one of the 3142's inspection hatches.

In other news, more work was done on New Jersey 4, the Newark PCC. The last wheel to be replaced has bolts located too close to the hub to fit an impact socket on, making them difficult to remove (on the other wheel bolted in like this, we ended up having to torch off two of the bolts). The crew was able to find a thin-wall socket and remove three of the bolts with that, but it wasn't impact-rated. We expected it to fail and it did, so the crew will tackle the three remaining bolts next time.

Fresh Lettering for AX545

Frank writes...

Sunday was a rainy and foggy day, with volunteers taking down Christmas lights and other displays from the recently ended - and very successful - Happy Holiday Railway 2025 event.

My focus for the day was lettering our air compressor wagon, AX545. This has been painted green by Mike S. but it was my job to letter it.

I'm fairly happy with the result. The most annoying thing was that the lettering paint was thin enough that it will need a second coat, though these photos don't make it as obvious as it is in person. I'm also not entirely happy with how the CTA emblem looks, but this is based off what we traced from the original, so there you go.

Anyway, the wheels are still in primer and there are some parts of the compressor mechanism that haven't been painted, but AX545 is getting close to having the repainting work completed. 

In other news, Will and Jimmy made more progress on NJT 4. It looks like the guys completed wheel #5 (actually the right wheel on the #3 axle) Saturday, as shown in the above photo. They then tackled the penultimate wheel, the right wheel on the #2 axle. This evidently included Jimmy countersinking the torque arm bracket holes, as shown below, for replacement of studs with bolts. By dinnertime, this wheel change had been completed in record time. Seven down, one to go!

In other news, Greg was working on hauling in lights and other displays (you can see some of the HHR "wildlife" in the compressor photos above), after which he and Brian switched CTA 3142 over to the inspection pit for some post-HHR maintenance work. They also put the BRC caboose, which had been spotted at the south end of the Yard 8 connector track, back in the barn before the predicted snow hits this week. And thanks to Brian for helping me retrieve a feed valve and J governor that he is planning to rebuild; the feed valve will go on the 319, while the governor will (I believe) be a working spare.

And at the end of the day, I cleaned up and primed the last significant parts of the spare grid box. These grid box parts have the laudable tendency to magically turn gloss black during the week when I'm not looking, so fingers crossed! But otherwise, I'll spray them black next weekend and that should complete this little side project.

Arctic Circles

Frank writes…

The good news was that, for the first weekend in 2025, Happy Holiday Railway wasn’t impacted by snow. The bad news was that the high temperature was about 10 degrees both days this weekend. But the show went on, and the visitors I spoke with were in good spirits. I showed up in uniform ready to work as "streetcar line relief," i.e. giving the day's streetcar motorman an hour-long lunch break, but it turned out the regular motorman had to leave at 5pm. So, I ended up running the 3142 in circles from 3pm until it went back to the barn around 8:30pm. It was chilly, but still, it's hard not to like spending a day on the Surface Lines!

Here's the 3142 at Central Avenue, ready for passengers. There were two cars on the streetcar line, the 3142 and CA&E 431, and we ran a simpler-than-normal operation by virtue of not stopping at Electric Park or Springfield Avenue.

The platform heaters to the left and right of the motorman do work, as does the heat throughout the 3142, but the car's heat is a bit anemic. Still, it was a lot warmer inside the car than outside! As you can see, this car is fittingly equipped with a prominent aluminum pole, and it's IRM, so of course feats of strength and the airing of grievances are a given.

I had a few trips that were sparsely patronized, but then there were also trips where we were completely full and turning people away - generally those were departures from Depot Street right after the Santa train had pulled in.

Zach Ehlers took the above photo, of me running the 3142 along the streetcar line east of the ruling curve, and the below photo of the 431, while he was out turning on the Christmas lights. As it got dark, the big attraction became seeing all the nice light displays at the south end of the museum from the streetcar.

Here's the 431 at South Junction. Two weeks ago, service was held down by the 3142 and the 749, which was nice if for no other reason than you had the "red car" and the "green car." Very festive of us!

And here's the view out my window at the end of the night as the last Santa train of the evening pulled into the station around 7:45. The 431 was run all day by Gregg, with his conductor Dan visible there on the right.

So, what else was happening?

Mike S. has been hard at work on the air compressor wagon, AX545. The priming is done, at least as far as I can tell, and now he's applying a fresh coat of CSL work car green. It's looking great! I had hoped to finish the stencils for this thing, but a half-day stint in service put off those plans until next week.

Here's another view of the compressor wagon.

It's hard to tell, but the above view shows the front truck of NJT 4. The guys were able to finally extract the last two intransigent bolts from the front wheel and install the wide-tread wheel, so the car now has four wide-tread wheels on its left side. They want to wye the car, since there's a lot more space on its south side than its north side right now. In the meantime, they put it over the inspection pit and on Sunday started doing some inspecting. The news was not good: the MG set and the first traction motor they meggered are both grounded. Regardless of the condition of the other motors and miscellaneous equipment, though, we plan to put the other four wide-tread wheels on the car so it can be towed around. Watch for news on that in the near future.

This is not the same side of the 1268 I photographed last weekend; a week ago, this side of the car was down to the sub-siding! But Tim has been making progress at his usual breakneck pace, and both sides of the car now have a complete set of brand-new tongue-and-groove siding installed.

And finally, these last two photos were sent in by Brian LaKemper, showing those grid box covers that he and Zach were working on lettering a few weeks ago. They're finished and now installed in the Class B, where they guard against accidental contact with the grid boxes. Brian pointed out that now all the rest of the interior equipment suddenly looks shabby by comparison!

Of course, there were other guys out. Greg, Brian, and Jimmy were working on the aforementioned testing of NJT 4's electrical equipment. Richard was running the "food donation bus" at the museum entrance and Joel and Good Nick spent much of their time helping with various event functions to help HHR run smoothly. Many thanks to all the volunteers who came out in the extreme cold to make it all happen!