Finished!

Frank writes...

There were a few different things happening on Sunday, but the most consequential for me - if not necessarily for anyone else - was that I completed painting work on Shaker Heights 63.

This involved climbing up on the roof and painting the whole center - anything that couldn't be reached from the top of a ladder - as well as the trolley base shroud grey. Now, there's an asterisk to this: although painting work is complete, I'd still like to apply a handful of decals or stickers at some point. These include the "Westbound Entrance" and "Eastbound Entrance" legends next to the doors and, more noticeably, the RTA emblems. I'd really love to get a copy of a vector file for that RTA emblem, which by the way, is still used by GCRTA. I've tried reaching out to them a couple of times with no success yet. Anyone know someone with that agency who could hook us up?

Joel ordered nice new blue flags for the barns, so the guys put this one up for me. Pretty slick! If you don't know what a blue flag means, then you'd better get back to studying that rulebook. Anyway, thanks to Dan and Greg for their help with the 63. After dinner, I picked up all the trash around the car - wadded-up masking tape, newspaper, used foam trim rollers, etc. - and threw it out. C'est fait.

Let's move to a more important project: the 36. It turns out we will want to chain the truck frame to the rail so we can freely jack up the spring plank, but where the truck was sitting on track 43, that's not possible because the pavement comes right up to the railhead. We're not complaining - we're glad it does - but we needed to move the truck over to track 42. Joel, shown here running the forklift, and Richard moved a pair of 4000 trailer trucks out of the way and then shifted the 36 truck over. The entire operation probably took 15 minutes. It's almost like they've done this before!

The other priority for the day was removing the two third rail beams from the R side of the 319 for replacement of the wooden beams. A huge thank you goes out to Mikey and two of his friends, who were all indispensable in getting the beams removed from the car and moved back to the shop. 

After dinner, Steven removed the thermostat from the 18. Above is a photo showing how the wires are connected; the wire with the tag goes on the "57/60" terminal and the other wire goes on the "R-881-C" (or something like that) side.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea how this thing works and virtually no idea how to troubleshoot it, so I'm hoping better minds can lend a hand. Our goal here is to get the heat working correctly in case the opportunity arises to use the 18 during the colder months. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion.

In other news, Nick and Greg were disconnecting the 600V connection to Barn 7 so that portion of the exterior sheathing could be replaced; Jimmy and Steven were in train service; Brian was working on air brake stuff; and Jerry - helped at times by Richard, JD, Steven, and others - was working on the CTA 6600s.

Sunday Progress Report

Frank writes...

Most of the department spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday switching, and we've got more on that below. For my part, I worked with various other volunteers to make progress on a few of our CA&E (and other) cars. Apologies in advance if I've forgotten anyone's name!

These aren't in chronological order, but the most notable step forward was probably the progress on the last third rail beam for the 460. Greg, Jimmy, and I went over to Barn 6, picked up the third rail beam, measured the correct end-to-end hole spacing, and brought the beam back to the car shop. Here it is after Greg set us up to drill new holes on the drill press. (I should also mention that this was made possible by Joel installing dowels in the old holes last week.) This project went smoothly, so we took the beam back over to Barn 6 just before dinnertime.

After dinner, Greg, Nick, and I installed the beam on the car. Voila, the 460 has a complete set of third rail beams, I believe for the first time since it left Wheaton in 1962.

Over on the CA&E wood car fleet, during the afternoon, Zach, Ashtin, Will, and I removed the pilot from the 36. We put the pilot along the barn wall and also moved the third rail beams from the trailer truck out of the way. We hope to pull the trailer truck within the next few weeks so that we can replace broken leaf spring packs; once that's done, the car should go back into revenue service for the first time since 2023.

I failed to get any photos, but Brian also got replacement studs and nuts - plus a new gasket - and reinstalled the feed valve on the 308. We still need to complete this car's annual inspection, but lacking motors at the moment simplifies that job.

There wasn't really any progress on the 451 this weekend, but it did get moved for the first time in a few months because the CTA 2200s that have been living at the northwest corner of Barn 4 left the barn via the pit lead and the 451 had to move out of the way. (The new denizens of Track 41 west of the curtain are Sand Springs 68 and Veracruz 19.) Here's the 451 being shoved back into its spot west of the pit. But wait, what's that in Yard 4?

That's right - like the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, the storage reefers have returned to Yard 4 East. Department switch crews brought them back over on Sunday morning and refilled track 42. While the reefers to the right, on track 43, are more or less immobile, the ones on track 42 are expected to move on an occasional basis to move cars in and out of the restoration bays at the east end of Barn 4 on the center track.

The other thing I worked on was Shaker Heights 63. I touched up the grey paint around the edges of the roof and the upper rear markers; although these areas were rolled with grey paint last fall, there were some spots that needed to be filled in. I still need to climb up on the roof one of these days and put a coat of grey on the center of the roof, but except for RA emblems and a bit of door-adjacent lettering, that will complete the paint job on this car.

50th Avenue

Before we get to the switching update, there's big news over at 50th Avenue! Ever since the 'L' station replaced Yard 1 back in the early 1980s, the plan has been to install a gantlet track on the west side that would allow us to operate either narrow (Chicago 'L' width) or wide (railroad width) equipment out of that track. But for the last 40 years or so, only the wide track has been in place, making it impractical to operate elevated-width equipment out of that track for the public due to the 1' or so gap. But this past week, our hardworking Track Department volunteers all took a week off their jobs and tackled the task of installing the "narrow track" on the west side of 50th. They also replaced ties and installed a switch. The result was that on Saturday, the 431 was brought over for clearance testing. After a bit of "platform shaving,” the test was a success! Thanks to Bill Wulfert for sending along these photos of the testing work on Saturday.

This is an exciting step forward. It will make it easy to operate two different shuttle trains out of 50th Avenue, meaning that if we want to, we can operate six mainline trains as part of a regular rotation instead of five - the usual four out of the depot plus two shuttle trains out of 50th. A huge THANK YOU goes out to our indefatigable Track Department for all their work to make this happen!

Switch-A-Palooza

There was quite a bit more switching on Saturday and Sunday, involving moving cars to different spots in various barns. Barns 4, 6, and 7 in particular have seen some changes. Barn 7 is now home to at least two cars that have been redeemed from exile in Barn 13. Thanks to Bill Wulfert for the following photos.

Detroit Department of Street Railways 3865 is our only "Peter Witt" and our only Detroit car. It was brought back to Barn 7 for display.

Here it is alongside CTA 2007, lettered 1892, which has been mostly stripped of parts and is due to be scrapped.

The 3865 was the subject of an uncompleted restoration by the Henry Ford Museum years before it came to IRM, so its exterior has a lot of new steel but the interior is still partially disassembled. But its exterior, though a bit worn, looks pretty nice. Another car that moved from Barn 13 to Barn 7 was Milwaukee snow sweeper B48, which is now parked between the two Shaker Heights cars I'm working on, the 63 and the 18.

The former occupant of that spot is Milwaukee 972, shown here running itself over to its new home at the west end of Barn 4 on the south track. The west end of the barn is going to be reopened to visitors, some 15 years or so after it was completely closed off, so we are moving some presentable cars into that end of the barn.

Moving off exhibit and down to Barn 13 is Milwaukee Electric 1129, our TM interurban coach.

This car was painted as Milwaukee Electric 1111 by Bill Nedden back in the 1970s, when things like that were less frowned upon than they would be now. In fact, the 1129 was sold to the London & Port Stanley before the TM ever adopted this "speed stripe" livery, so it never appeared anything like this.

You'll note that as a single-ended car, it only has doors on one side (and the ends). The left side of the car is completely "blind."

And some additional photos taken during the Saturday switch-a-thon were sent by Joel:

Here's IT 1702, looking smart with a demonstration wire spool prototypically mounted on its deck.

Milwaukee Electric L7 runs, but its air compressor needs an overhaul.

And here's the L10, which was also brought back from exile in Barn 13. It was the subject of on-again, off-again work in the early 2000s, and there's some interest in diving back into it to see if we can make it an operating locomotive for the first time in probably 50 years.

A lot more equipment has moved around that isn't pictured here; you'll just have to visit to see all the changes!

Sunday Update

Frank writes…

My big news for Sunday, if you can call it that, is that painting on the 63 is now complete except for the roof (and RTA emblems, but I’m hoping those end up being stickers, like the originals, and not painted on).

I spent most of my afternoon putting a second coat of maroon on the stripes at the top of the car - the stripe along the roof line as well as the drip rail underneath the standee windows - after which the masking tape came off, and voila.

I still need to touch up the grey paint along the edges of the roof line and paint the center of the roof, where I can't reach from a ladder, but that's it. It's very far from perfect, but nevertheless I daresay the car looks better than it did when I started.

In other news, Mike S has been working hard on cleaning up our air compressor wagon, AX545. You can see that he's already wire-wheeled a good portion of the frame and sides.

Richard and I traced what lettering we could off the thing, though we weren't able to get a whole lot. It looks like standard CSL Roman, so I'm hoping we can "fill in the gaps" with lettering off the X4 and F305. 

Here's the badge plate off one of the "tanks," which are the pipes built into the frame, dating it to 1936. That's a good guess as to when this was built.

Speaking of AX545, our friend Art Peterson was kind enough to spend time looking through his photo collection and sent a few shots of CSL (and later CTA) air compressor wagons at work.

Here's a 1940 photo on State Street near Randolph, and in the left foreground you can see what looks like air compressor wagon AX509 (five-oh-something, anyway) about to be passed by southbound CSL "Big Brill" 5012. If you look closely, you can see the long stick that was used to provide trolley power to the compressor. At the end of the stick was some sort of fancy L-bracket-looking thing that sat atop the wire, which together with the stick being long enough to be angled way over to the side, allowed service cars to pass the compressor wagon without having to "hop" the pole.

This undated photo is a decade or so later, showing cars eastbound on Madison at Wacker. It looks like quite a crowd has gathered to watch the track gang at work! To the left of Pullman-built postwar PCC 4089, is air compressor AX5** with part of its number out of sight.

But here's the neatest shot Art sent. Not only is it in color, and not only is there a CA&E train in the photo, but it shows our air compressor wagon, AX545! This photo was taken by George Krambles on August 30, 1953, and it shows the loop at Desplaines Avenue under construction just weeks before CA&E service was cut back to this spot. In the left background is the Great Western station with a two-car inbound CA&E train in front of it.

A closeup of AX545 shows that at the time it had a wooden tray mounted to its roof, and it also looks like it had a reel or something where today there's an extra air tank. This also looks like it was before electric "marker" lights were added to the wagon. The number and CTA emblem are plainly visible. Pretty neat.

And it's only tangentially related to AX545, but Art also sent this photo, taken just moments earlier by George at the same location. This is the train visible earlier in the background, and what interests me is that it's a nice shot of the 457's roof as built, complete with three-across roof boards and sheet metal "skirts" hiding the saddles. Thanks, Art!

Back to Sunday, the regular crew of volunteers was working on a few different things after having spent their Saturday enjoying a spiced-ham-themed CTA fan trip. Brian L and I spent a little time investigating the 319's feed valve, which was acting up in September. We decided with some confidence that the locomotive-style (M3?) feed valve currently on the car is not correct for it, and that it ought to have a normal C6 feed valve the same as the rest of the wood cars. It's likely that what's on the car now was installed by Brookins. Fortunately, the pipe bracket appears to be the original one, so it shouldn't be goo big of a project to correct this grave injustice. We'll add it to the list.

The AX Lands

Frank writes…

The big news on Sunday, other than it being the last operating day of the regular 2025 season, was the arrival of a pretty unusual piece of Chicago Surface Lines history. Meet our new-to-us air compressor wagon, CSL AX545.

Portable compressors like this were used by a lot of street railway companies on work sites, often by track gangs. The compressor runs off 600V DC and has a stinger that would be put over the trolley wire. Originally, the stinger would have been at the end of a long wooden pole, but this particular item is missing. Still, AX545 seems to be mostly complete, if not quite in pristine condition. It looks to have been built in 1936 (based on a pressure vessel tag) by Chicago Pneumatic Tool Co. It still has the remnants of its CSL work car green paint on it. Thanks to Richard for looking the compressor over in detail and gleaning some important details about it, like the construction date.

We'd like to thank Wendell Dillinger, who died a couple of years ago and left AX545 to IRM in his will. Thanks also go to Bill Wall, who helped coordinate the retrieval of the air compressor, as well as Mike Graycar and the folks at the Middletown & Hummelstown Railroad, who held onto it for us and helped load it to come to Union.

And speaking of thanks, a huge thank you goes to Dan and Jon Fenlaciki, who on short notice drove out to Middletown, PA, towing a trailer to pick this thing up. They left Friday morning and were back in Union late Saturday night, which is quite a feat! It's really thanks to Dan and Jon that this artifact is back home. It sounds like we've got a regular who is interested in cleaning it up and giving it a coat of fresh CSL paint, so stay tuned.

Besides the new air compressor and the end of the operating season, the other big news Sunday was a big switch move. There were a few goals with this move, one of which was to get any cars we might need for Happy Holiday Railway out of Barn 6, since the whole barn will be festooned with a remarkable light display thanks to the hard work of Jim Ward. The 431 usually lives on track 62, but it's a backup car for the streetcar line during HHR, so it and the 319 got swapped for the winter. Below, the 319 is in its new digs. Joel said he told Jim to only use screws when affixing lights to the 319, no nails, so I'm sure everything will be fine.

And then there was a big move in Barn 7. As seen below, when track 74 is mostly empty, there's a lot of space! I ran a couple of cars back into this track at the end of the day and it's odd to be rolling through the barn... rolling... rolling more...

Anyway, the goal was to get New Jersey Transit 4, which was built in 1946 as Twin City Rapid Transit 323, out and over to Barn 4 for some looking over. Since car 4 has skinny wheels, the entire switch move was at walking speed, and people were keeping an eye on every truck. There were no derailments.

Here's the car at the tail track, with Nick and Joel visible on the ground while Brian L and Brian D were up in the engine. This car ran in Newark most of its service life and ran up until 2001, when the Newark PCC fleet was replaced by LRVs.

Below, one of the last cars to go back into the barn at the end of the switch move was Veracruz 19.

And now we'll rewind a bit to earlier in the day, when I put a first coat of maroon paint on the stripe along the roof line of the 63. Thanks to Brian Davies for the below photo of yours truly at work.

Once the cars on 74 left, I was able to stand back and get this shot of the car with the late afternoon light shining in on it. The 63 still hasn't been outside since I started painting it, but we'll try and get it outside for at least a quick look sometime next year.

And here's another view. The stripes up top still need a second coat, but that will complete everything except for the RTA emblems and some grey that still needs to be done on the roof.

And Jeron sent a couple more photos which I believe were taken Sunday night after the switch move was over. First, the 4391 is now on the pit for its annual inspection. Joel and the crew finished inspecting Illinois Terminal 277 and 518 earlier in the day, just before the big switch move, and the "Hornet" is next on the list. Beyond it you can see NJT 4.

And here's the inside of the Newark PCC. It's in remarkably good condition, save for some peeling paint. Unlike car 63, which was substantially modified by Shaker Heights - it got couplers and MU equipment, new doors, and new seats in half the car among other things - the NJT car received relatively few modifications during its time in Newark.

Changing the subject, where you are going to be on Saturday? That's right - Skokie! Everyone who's anyone will be riding the Fall Colors Express, your ticket to set the clock back not just an hour but several decades with a ride on the CTA aboard 1959-vintage 6000s. There are still a few tickets left, but don't delay! You don't want to get left on the platform and have to take the regular Niles Center local aboard some modern sealed-window contraption. So if you like 'L' cars, fan trips, processed ham, or all of the above, get your ticket here!