Making Gladhands Tight

Is it spring yet?  The Electroliner (actually just a quarter Liner) pokes its nose out the door to see.

Meanwhile, in the shop, a DH-25 compressor is slated for use on the 451.  If the armature resistance is too low, an easy thing to do is to put a light bulb inside to drive out the moisture.   So keep your fingers crossed.   

Now for some vocational instruction, in case you ever want to make brakes hoses for a living.  Gerry Dettloff demonstrates how to use our banding machine for attaching gladhands and fittings to  the hoses.  Here's the device with a new band in place, ready to tighten down.

Helped by Bob Olson, he puts the hose into the band, and then the gladhand is put into the hose.

Then he starts cranking to tighten the band until it refuses to move any more.

Now Jeron also lends a hand, and shows how the band is crimped and cut in one motion.

And when it's done, it looks like this.  This will be used on the 810.

And here's a before and after shot of the two hoses for the car.

And here's another mystery photo contest: what exactly is this?  It's a clamp of some sort, with handles for manipulating it, but what is it used for?  Send in your suggestions.  I have dibs on the medieval torture device theory.

Tim continues to produce new doors and windows, as seen here.

This is a motorman's door for the 1754.   Tim points out that this door was reversed by moving both the hinges and the door latch from one side to the other when the Northwestern Elevated switched from left-hand to right-hand running.

And several new window frames are in the big press.

As for me, I was mostly working in the 319's vestibule again. 

 Some more sanding and scraping, but it's getting close to completion.  Surface prep is followed by a first coat of white primer, which is usually enough.

Then there were several parts of the vestibule that were ready for a first coat of finish red.  Brilliant!

The red does not cover very well, and two or three coats will be required.

And then I put the second new clerestory window in place in the 150 (on the left).  

And I spent some time looking for a replacement brake cutout for the 309.  The original is the black one at lower left.  I tested three from the Museum's supply of these things, but so far without success.  The flunkers are tagged and put back into storage.  But I'll keep looking.

No Tailgating!

I really dislike tailgaters.  Don't you?  It's very irksome to have someone following too close behind you, especially after dark.  And that's even more true when you're running a train.   That's why we have big red tail lights for use at night.

Bob Heinlein recently gave me a tail light from the CTA that is badly rusted, but should be very useful after some cleaning.  A couple of years ago I cleaned up and repainted a tail light of the same type from the CA&E as seen here.  And the goal is to make the next one look just as good.

Unfortunately it's very rusty, but not rusted through anywhere.  I plan to take it out to the Museum and sandblast it.

Of course, more modern L cars don't need separate lights like this, so in later years this one was evidently used at an office on the structure somewhere:

It took some work, but I finally got the rear door open.

The kerosene reservoir is very rusty, but the brass mechanism still works, and just needs to be oiled.

On the top, you can barely make out a tag reading "CRT".  Compare this to the CA&E one shown earlier.

And on the lid, we see that this is the "Non-Sweating" type.   Whew, that's a relief!

We may want to run two trains of wood cars at night this year, so this will be nice to have once it's been fixed up.  And all you other motormen out there, don't get too close!   

The Museum Never Sleeps

Even in the middle of winter, no matter how cold it may be outside, with our heated shop facilities we can keep working here at IRM.  A lot of progress is accomplished, and it's better than sitting at home watching TV, if you ask me.  (Not that I can say why you should....)

Anyway, let's start by looking at some of the other projects going on in the shop.  As always, Tim is hard at work.  Here he's making new window frames for CRT 1754.

Notice that he has the right cutters so that the rails fit into the stiles properly.  This is exactly the way it would be done for production runs back in the old days.

And the bottom metal channels for the doors have been made, and here he is checking the fit:

Frank Sirinek was painting the metal strips for the blinker doors on the Kansas City PCC: 

Lorne and Eric are checking out new parts for the ventilation system on the Cleveland PCC.  This will be almost entirely new construction when finished.

Dan Fenlaciki is an expert Mig welder, and he was fixing up a couple of parts for Tim (the steel channels seen above) and Roger Kramer (a seat bracket for one of the Rock Island cars.)  The arc is extremely bright, of course, so I didn't want to get too close.

Appearances notwithstanding, he survived the process just fine, I think.

Finally, although it's less exciting, we'll turn to what I was doing.  I finished up the truss rods on the 36 by attaching all of the brackets at each end, as seen here.  I'm thinking that the main reason for these is that if a pin were to break while the car was in motion, these keep the rod from hitting the ground or other stationary objects.  The rods aren't stiff enough to pole vault the car off the track, but there's no telling what they might hit or damage on the car itself, or its passengers.  I don't remember seeing these on cars from other lines, but they're easily overlooked.

I also want to complain that it was even colder inside the barn than outside.  Who do I talk to???

Inside the 319's vestibule, however, it got pretty toasty, so it was time for more sanding, and then painting.  Yes, I know, this looks a lot like Groundhog Day, same old stuff every day.  First primer on some sections:

And then first finish red on some other parts, mostly the ceiling:

And some second red: 

 That's all for today, but we have a couple of historical articles in the pipelines, so stay tuned!

Wednesday Report

Wednesday is usually the busiest day of the week at IRM, and today there were lots of people around working on various projects.  While waiting for our precious supply of acetylene to show up, I started with more sanding in the vestibule of the 319.   That by itself isn't very interesting, but I thought I'd point out one more minor detail on the car.

On each side of the wooden plate over the train door, there are two little brass catches of the sort used with spring-loaded latches, such as on the flag box.  The plate itself is attached with screws and cannot move.

Those brass castings would only make sense if the plate were originally hinged at the top, and needed to be opened for some reason.  But the main cable to the bus jumper passes through the plate, so how it could possibly be hinged I have no idea.

Jon Fenlaciki worked for the Canadian National for many years, and is now retired.   At Jon's importunity, the company has made a generous contribution to IRM for restoration of IRR 65, his favorite project.  Of course, we are very grateful for their support.  Today CN sent a professional photographer out to take pictures of Jon receiving the check from Museum President Norm Krentel.

These pictures will appear in the company magazine.

But remember, you saw them here first, even if you too work for CN.

Anyway, back to work.  Gerry fired up the torch and heated up the last stuck pin holding the south truss rod.

This makes me nervous, but Gerry knows what he's doing and did not set the 115-year old wooden car on fire.  Once the pin was out and the rod was free, we then heated up the rod and worked out the last major bend.

Then we put the rods back into place, and started inserting all the parts.  Did I mention that those rods are heavy?  Once the turnbuckles are tightened up, the rods are nice and solid.  And they look almost perfectly straight, a big improvement.

And then first primer on more parts of the vestibule.  Painting the ceiling gets old in a hurry, but who am I to complain?   At least it's nice and warm in here. 

Buzz has finished two new door for the Marengo depot, and started putting a first finish coat on them as seen here.

Jeff and Norm and Rich and Pete and several others were working on their projects, but I didn't get a chance to photograph them.

Sparks flying

Frank writes...

I was out at IRM again on Sunday and worked on a few different things down at the south end of the property. Job one was cleaning up from our tarp removal project the previous week. A group of us including Joel, Greg, and Richard, plus Brian and Jeron from the Passenger Car and Diesel Departments, folded up the remains of the old tarps that had been removed from the THI&E cars and from CSL 4001 for disposal. We also took a look inside THI&E 50. The structure of this car is in very poor shape but the interior is impressively complete and original, not ever having been painted since it left service. Below, Joel takes a look at a bracket in the back corner of the car which stumped me until Joel pointed out that it was designed to store the stick for adjusting the ceiling ventilators. To the right of Joel is the car's toilet compartment.

And then it was on to car work. Richard and Greg led up an effort to remove a badly rusted steel plate just inside the door of Shaker Heights 18. After a fair amount of fighting with rusted bolts, we ended up cutting the heads off of the bolts. Below Richard is shown using a cutting wheel to make the sparks fly; below that is a photo showing the final results. The reason this work is necessary is pretty obvious! The plate is still in place because we need to drill out a row of screws along the top (they're wood screws but are amazingly stubborn) but once that's done we'll get a new plate fabricated and installed. That will be one step forward.

And there was also some inventorying work, which is significantly less odious than you'd expect when you're a "parts fan" like myself. Basically it means checking through some of our storage areas in search of needed mechanical components. As Bob Bruneau always used to say, "parts is parts!" It never hurts to have spares on hand. And that leads us to this week's Trivia Question:

What in the world is this?

Submit a comment with the answer... the prize is absolutely nothing. Did I mention we're cheap?

In Memoriam - Robert E. Bruneau, 1933-2017

"Let me tell you a story." I can't remember how many times I heard that from Bob Bruneau during the years I was volunteering in the Car Department while he was the department head. Bob was one of my best friends at IRM and was something of a mentor, not only to me but to many others.  And along with being a department head, historian, machinist, and general repository of knowledge, he was a story teller. Frequently he would hold an entire room of people in rapt attention talking about riding his beloved Illinois Terminal through central Illinois back in the 1950s - or have his audience practically on the floor laughing telling stories about a long-gone model railroad club or hijinks during the early days at IRM. He was a compelling mix of gregarious yet shrewd; full of information and experience yet self-effacing and unpretentious. He was an irreplaceable trove of stories, information, and memories, and had the ability to make a friend out of a stranger within moments of meeting him. Not only is IRM the poorer for his passing, but so too are all of us who knew him.

Bob was born in 1933 and by his early 20s had become a fan of the IT, a passion that would be lifelong. He would take the Rock Island to Peoria on a Friday night and ride the interurban from there down to St. Louis, spending the weekend riding and observing the last of the truly typical Midwest interurban lines. When mainline interurban passenger service quit in 1956, he borrowed money from his parents and purchased two IT cars, combine 277 and suburban center-entrance car 101. He donated them to IRM (then the Illinois Electric Railway Museum in North Chicago), becoming a regular member in March 1956. Drafted into the army and serving in Korea, Bob missed the end of IT passenger service in 1958 - which he always regretted - but upon his return he quickly became a vital member of the museum's volunteer corps. In 1964, when frantic work to move the entire museum from North Chicago to Union was underway, Bob quit his job as a machinist ("one of my many retirements," he'd say) and essentially lived at the museum for a time. He was in charge of the North Chicago end of the moving operation and would travel home to Chicago once a week to do laundry and pick up food and supplies. He was in charge of a myriad of tasks including prepping cars for movement, making sure needed parts made it to Union, selling spare components for scrap to raise badly-needed cash (he would recall sadly sending brand new GE traction motors from ComEd, still in packing crates, off to scrap), and cleaning up the property.

At Union, for a time Bob was the museum's General Manager and over the years he participated in a number of restoration projects, many - but not all - on Illinois Terminal cars. He always had ambitions to rebuild the 234, perhaps his favorite of the mainline IT car fleet, and return it to an earlier appearance with railroad roof and arched windows. He also rebuilt one end of line car 1702 and did maintenance and repair work on the 101, 415, 277, 1565, and other cars at one time or another. Around 1989, in the middle of acquiring a raft of cars from East Troy, he became head of the Car Department, a post he held for nearly 20 years. The car department has always been a large department in terms of number of volunteers and has long been relatively laissez-faire in its direction; Bob led in that spirit. He was always available to help out a project with advice, experience, or the procuring of spare parts from mysterious hiding places. And he set the standard for quality of work; he painted wooden window frames so perfectly they had the appearance of an automotive finish.

I got to know Bob when I started spending more time volunteering at IRM in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At that time Bob would take the train out to Crystal Lake on Saturday night (to my knowledge he never had a driver's license nor owned a car) and someone would give him a lift to the property. He'd then stay out in Union until Wednesday at dinnertime, when he would either take the train back to his house in Chicago or be given a ride. For years, Saturdays in the Car Department were the non-smoking days, when some of the younger guys and "L" car fans would come out and volunteer, while Sundays were for the "Bruneau crowd" - mostly cigar smokers. Bob himself always smoked Muriel Air Tip cigars and for years the sight of those little plastic cigar tips here and there in the ballast was ubiquitious. Late into the night, Bob would hold court in the smoke-filled car shop for story-telling sessions and discussions that would generally last until one or two in the morning. And he doted on Mr. Socks, the shop cat, who slept in Bob's office in a file drawer - filed under "C" for "cat," of course.

Bob had great stories. He'd talk about riding the IT late at night, in the middle of nowhere between substations where the voltage drop was so bad that wrapping up the controller would practically extinguish the headlight, and the motorman would keep the handle on the post until just before hitting each grade crossing where he'd shut off and suddenly the whole track would be lit up. Or about watching the NYC and PRR race outbound through Englewood, with the Pennsy's turbine locomotive sailing past, throwing chunks of molten slag out the stack at a prodigious rate (Bob said the fans called that thing the "volcano"). Or about hanging off the side of an antique firetruck during a high-speed joyride through Union back in the mid-1960s when IRM was briefly home to a small firetruck museum. Or about working in Ohio to rebuild and re-wheel an open car for Gerald Brookins - the open car now at IRM, the 19. It seemed like he remembered it all, everything that had ever happened to him or at IRM.

One of his latter-day stories that sticks in my mind was about a time in the 1990s when someone took the 415 out for a mainline trip after dark. There wasn't much interest in riding the car and it was just Bob and a few other guys riding along. Somewhere along the trip the skies opened up and it started to pour. The wind was blowing strongly from the south so they closed the windows on that side of the car. The north-facing windows stayed open. And they rode along through the dark, nobody talking, enjoying the sound of the the wheels and the motors and the pouring rain. Back in the 1950s, out in the middle of nowhere in central Illinois, rocketing through the darkness.


Memorial wake:
Thursday, February 2nd
3pm-9pm
Nelson Funeral Home
820 W Talcott Road
Park Ridge, IL 60068