More Cars That Got Away

Our friend Bill Stewart recently found some interesting archival material to share with us.

He writes:

1) The fuzzy qualities of this photo of our late friend, CA&E 318, seem to suggest that this is a historic image.  To the contrary: it was taken at Westport, Indiana in the 1960s.  The car is spotted on the “main line”of the former Indiana Railway Museum -- the final few yards of the Milwaukee Road’s Indiana extension, which interchanged here with the New York Central’s Louisville-Elkhart secondary main line, visible to the left.  (Ed.: The 318 was heavily damaged in transit in 1971, and purchased by IRM in 1977 to be scrapped for parts.  The parts have been used to restore other cars.)

2) In a photo that has to date to 1969, for reasons to be provided below, the friendly face of the 318 leans over to smile at the happy crowd on the platform of Penn Central business car 180.  But how could that be?

Explanation:  In 1967 or 1968, the late Brigadier General Robert Moorhead, Commander of the Indiana Army National Guard, began a private initiative to save his favorite passenger train, the NYC’s Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Chicago “Deluxe All-Coach Streamliner,” the James Whitcomb Riley.  Moorhead created the Riley Booster Club, Inc. as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, hired part-time staff, paid for newspaper and broadcast promotions, and began buying surplus NYC rolling stock from the nearby Beech Grove Shops to use as excursion cars attached to the regular Riley consist.  Moorhead owned Central Publishing, Inc., a large Indianapolis printing company, and printed promotional materials for the Riley that were distributed through travel agencies and other sites.  To share information and human resources, the Booster Club came to operate as an extension of the Indiana Railway Museum.  Eventually the lightweight car fleet filled two tracks at the former Pullman Company Capitol Avenue Coach Yard, adjacent to Indianapolis Union Station.

In one of the newly-formed Penn Central’s many quirky moves, Pennsylvania Railroad business car 180 (equipped, interestingly, with four-wheel trucks instead of the usual six-wheel variety typically specified for heavyweight cars) was repainted in the PC’s new green-and-white paint scheme, assigned to a New York-based VP, then retired within a year and laid up at Beech Grove.  General Moorhead purchased the car for a nominal sum and stored it temporarily at Westport while arrangements were being finalized for use of the Capitol Avenue Coach Yard.  The car later operated on several long-distance excursions, including a memorable 1970 Indianapolis-St. Louis round trip on the rear of PC trains 31 and 30, the Spirit of St. Louis.

In this Westport scene, however, it is serving only as a viewing platform for a crowd that came to ride a two-mile round trip aboard the 318, pulled by a little 0-4-0 tank engine.  Even the smallest of those kids is now a “mid-century” adult, age 50+.

After the arrival of Amtrak, operational changes made private car operation from Indianapolis increasingly impractical.  General Moorhead sold the 180 to an individual in Kansas.  But that did not turn out well, and the car was later scrapped.  Too bad, because as older photos indicate, it was once a most handsome car.

More Car Department Progress

Today was another exciting work day at Union, so we have some pictures to share.  As usual, there were several other projects going on that we missed.  We'll start with CA&E 451.

I continued working on attaching the roof cables and installing roof hardware of various sorts.  Two of the three cables at the #1 end are now connected, as seen here.  I later caulked and attached the castings that pass through holes in the roof.  I also attached the second trolley hook and worked on other parts of the roof.

At the #2 end, I installed the rope guard and the drip rail over the train door, as well as two drip rails over the side doors on the south side.  The lift is essential for jobs like these.

Later, I worked on one of the trolley bases, which had a broken spring.

After some work, it was reassembled, and should be ready for primer, black, and then installation.

Next: Pete Galayda continues work on the interior of the North Shore 160.  The interior woodwork really looks good.

This side of the smoker is finished.

And he continues replacing windows and wood trim parts on the other side, as seen here:

Finally, we have the Fox River 306.  John Sheldon and Fred Zimmerman were working on the floor.  It's going to look as good as new. 

Here we see Gerry doing more welding on the side of the car.  You'll have to take my word for it. 

Here John is taking more measurements for parts of the floor.

And Fred is removing more of the old coating on the floor.

And as I said, there were other projects being pursued.  Tim doesn't want people climbing onto the 1754, so today he was working on the anticlimbers.  And Norm Krentel was working on parts for the Michigan Electric car.  And I'm sure I'm missing something else.  You just gotta be there.

Car 18 runs!

Frank writes...

IRM now has another car in its operating fleet! Shaker Heights 18 was made operational and, after a few tentative voyages up and down the inspection pit lead, went for a couple of test trips around the streetcar line.

This progress was made much quicker than anticipated, but it's thanks to the hard work of the car shop regulars: Joel, Zach, Nick, Jeron, Greg, and Richard (I'm sorry if I left anyone out!). They brought the 18 over to the pit to look at the air compressor. That led to the compressor being dropped and new brushes being put in, but once it was meggered and reinstalled it was started up and surprisingly few leaks were found. All of the car's electrical circuits had already been tested so after the controls were sequenced the motor leads were hooked up and it was time for some testing.

Overall the car seems to run very nicely. There are a handful of small air leaks but nothing that can't be addressed. One bearing started to run a bit warm so we will repack that. We haven't been able to get the tail end marker lights working because the cast lens frames are cemented in place by rust and paint, but that will be taken care of.

The interior lights work, and we figured out what the big rotary switch on the wall does (unfortunately I failed to take a photo of it). There are six bulbs in the series and the rotary switch shorts out each of them in sequence so that you can cut a bad bulb out of the circuit. That not only means it's easy to identify which bulb went bad, but if you lose a bulb leaving Terminal Tower then you're not in the dark all the way out to Shaker Heights (there's only one circuit that provides the entire car's worth of interior illumination). Neat!

Obviously there's more to do on the car. A lot of it is cosmetic: the car badly needs a new paint job, and volunteers from the Northern Ohio Railway Museum have been contacted about the correct color formula. It will need some more windows repaired, and that work is underway; needs some new destination sign glass; a few air system fixes; and longer-term will need the interior gone over and refurbished, with refreshed paint and varnish. We are also missing one short bench seat cushion. But generally everything looks promising. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who got car 18 running!

As usual, other projects are making noticeable progress too. The lean-to was a regular Highwood Shops, with a few different North Shore efforts in evidence. Here is the old train door and the new replacement train door for MD car 213. It must be the train door because the only other doors on the car are big baggage doors!

And these are the new end windows for the 757. By the end of the day the holes for the hardware and mounting strips had been drilled and the windows were ready for installation once some welding work on the support frames is done.

The North Shore Bandit returns - this week Zach was cutting out new linoleum for the floor in the smoker of the 757. The car has this patterned white linoleum under the seats, with a red walkway down the center aisle bordered by narrow black linoleum strips. When IRM acquired car 757 from East Troy the smoker linoleum had been replaced by some 1970s-era stuff, so in 2012 that was pulled out. After a few years of dormancy the compartment is now acquiring a new, correct, floor.

Zach also snapped a photo of me wire-wheeling trolley base parts for the 451. Many thanks to Zach, Joel, and Richard, who helped get parts we need out of storage including roof fuse boxes, a trolley hook, and a new trolley base spring.

Speaking of stuff pulled out of storage, this intriguing item was found in one of our storage cars. It's a little sheet metal house, probably to be mounted on a line pole, and has a blue lens and a big switch handle poking out the bottom. Anyone know what it is?

Doodlebug Update

Over in Barn 2, Gregg Wolfersheim has resumed work on his doodlebug.   He writes:

 With the partial reopening of the shops at IRM, work has now resumed. Three lower window areas got the insulation installed, and the one on the right was painted:

Soon after, the plywood facing was installed and final painting done:

Window #22 was reinstalled:

 If you have been following my reports, you'll notice I refer to windows by number. Looking at the tops, you can see a stamping. In this photo of the left side is the car number. M35 in 1/2" numbers:

 On the right side is the window number, 23. Even though the dimensions are close between parts, they often are not interchangeable. So it's really important to keep them in their proper openings so everything fits better. Soon the last two windows should be back in.

Car Shop Progress

Now that work has restarted at the Museum, we have a lot of pent-up energy to apply to the active projects.  Remember that the property is still not open to visitors, and only working members are allowed, with the approval of your department curator.

Here's just a few of the current activities in Barn 4.

On CA&E 451, the newly-painted running boards have been installed, and I'm working on attaching the various hardware pieces, such as trolley hooks, grab irons, rain gutters, etc.  The boards are actually a nice, shiny black; what you're seeing in these pictures is the green reflection from the skylights in the wall of the barn.  I assure you the boards are not really a hideous green.

And across the aisle, the roof of the 1754 is pretty complete.

Work has resumed in earnest on the Fox River 306.

Here Gerry is welding up a replacement piece for the side wall of the car.

And John Sheldon is installing the new floor.  It's really looking great!

And Tim, of course, continues work on the 1754, which is nearing completion.

Here he shows off some new metal parts recently fabricated in the blacksmith shop.

And the interior is being finished up nicely.

Well, it's nice for us to have progress to report once again.  Stay tuned!

It's good to be back

Frank writes...

As the state of Illinois progresses from Stage 2 to Stage 3, it has been authorized that employees and working volunteers may return to the property to commence maintenance and other ongoing work. The museum is NOT open - for the foreseeable future we are still closed to the public, and in fact we are closed to members too unless they are working volunteers. If you're a volunteer and want to help, make sure to contact your department head to get assigned a date and time you can come out. There are also a variety of rules in place about social distancing, wearing masks, etc. But despite the "not quite normal" aspect of all of it, it's definitely good to be back.

So progress has resumed. The above photo shows a new coat of white primer on the belt rail of Shaker Heights 18. Last year, when the car was still in Barn 13, I had sanded down much of the belt rail of the car. Most of the paint on the car is in reasonably good shape, specially on the metal portions, but the paint on the belt rail was mostly falling off. So this is an improvement.

This car has drop windows designed to be stowed away in pockets in the walls. Like the Matchbox, for instance, there are little hinged covers that serve as the interior window sill and cover the windows when they're stowed. Except that it doesn't work that way any more; when Shaker took the window guards off of these cars in the mid-1940s, they blocked the wall pockets so that the windows only drop halfway. So when the windows are open you get the slightly unorthodox appearance shown here. In other news, I also removed and plugged off the under-floor air line to the trip cock. That system was only installed on car 18 near the end of its service life and won't be appropriate for its target restoration date of about 1945. As a single-ended car, the 18 only had a single trip cock mounted to the back of the front truck, so fortunately it was a pretty simple system.

The B&G guys have been hard at work. The north side of Barn 3, facing the playground and also recently re-skinned I believe, now has this newly renovated sign.

And what's going on with the depot? Well, this is part of a project to have the building professionally repainted, and these windows are being closed up to try and conserve heat in the building during the winter among other things. I was told that this will henceforth be a solid board-and-batten wall, which will actually be returning it to its original appearance since this was the freight station end of the building and it didn't have windows at this location until the depot came to IRM. In the background is the 604, which was doing some line work on Station 1. For most of the day there were a few volunteers on the 604 out on the railroad catching up with some deferred maintenance on our overhead wire.

He may look like a bandit trying to steal motorman's windows, but it's actually Zach test-fitting a rebuilt window in the end of the 757 with help from the disembodied hand of Brian L. Zach was working most of the day on getting these windows ready to install; once in place the 757 will be fully closed up for the first time in a number of years. Other projects in the car shop are seeing progress too including painting roof boards for CA&E 451, various fixtures being installed on the 1754, painting on CTA 4146, and progress on the Fox River Electric car as well.

Random historical artifacts

Frank writes...

I happened upon something that I found earlier this year that I thought was of slight historical interest. At the time I was going through some of the spare parts we acquired back in 2010 from Trolleyville and came across the above letter, albeit in fragmentary form. It was sent by John someone from the Arden Trolley Museum (today the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum) to Ed Blossom, who headed up restoration work at the Magee Trolley Museum. Dated July 27, 1967, it appears to outline several Pittsburgh streetcars converted for work service that were still on the Port Authority roster and might be available.

It was around this time, or I think a bit later, that Magee purchased high-floor car M459 and undertook a major restoration project to restore it to as-built condition as Pittsburgh Railways 4145. That car isn't among the ones listed on this letter, though, so it may have been inadvertently left off or it may have already been purchased by Magee (or allocated to some other group that later backed out). The cars listed include M454, which was bought by Arden and later scrapped for parts; M451, apparently bought by Arden as a parts source shortly before this letter; M200, which went to Arden in 1972 and is today preserved there in work car configuration; and M452, which I have no information on. It's not still around so it was probably cut up in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Anyway, this piece of paper had a pretty strange journey. It looks like it was just thrown into a pile with a bunch of spare parts when the Magee museum collection was dispersed in 1973 after that museum was badly damaged in Hurricane Agnes. This pile of parts accompanied car M459/4145 to Trolleyville, and this paper was again in with a bunch of parts when that museum's collection was dispersed in 2009. This time it made its way yet further west to Illinois. And here it is.

The latest from the museum

Remember, you can sign up to receive these e-newsletters yourself at the bottom of www.irm.org:

Cancellations and Covid-19 Updates  It's been a while since we have sent out a newsletter, but that's because there hasn't been much IRM news. The museum is closed until further notice due to coronavirus. We have also cancelled all special events through early September. Among these is Day Out With Thomas, which has been cancelled for 2020. More information may be found below. Featured in this e-newsletter: Day Out With Thomas 2020 cancelled The museum is closed until further notice due to coronavirus New webcam added overlooking museum property Museum acquires 1998 Dayton trolley bus Restoration work continues as volunteers work from home Historic signs available in IRM's online sign shop Planned giving - another way you can support IRM

Visit us online for schedules, blog updates, and more

Day Out With Thomas Cancelled The health and well-being of our guests, volunteers, employees and partners continues to be our first priority. After careful consideration, the Illinois Railway Museum has decided that it will not be possible to hold Day Out With Thomas events in 2020. The museum is continuing to monitor Illinois state guidance as it affects our ability to welcome visitors back to our site, on even a restricted scale. However, it is now clear that we could not realistically hope to safely host the large numbers of visitors attracted by Thomas to the site within the next couple of months. If you already hold tickets for the event, no action is necessary. Ticketweb will begin issuing refunds to the card that was used to buy the tickets within the next week. It is a great sadness to us that this will be the first time in many years that we have not been able to host this event and we hope that you will be able to join us for Day Out With Thomas events in 2021. Thank you for your understanding during these uncertain times. Click here for info

The Museum is closed for now Due to the great deal of uncertainty surrounding opening and operating our Museum campus consistent with public policy and health recommendations, the Illinois Railway Museum remains closed to the public until further notice and has elected to proactively cancel all previously-announced special events scheduled through September 15, 2020. The Museum does not take this action lightly, but it is the most prudent action to take to preserve the health and safety of our volunteers, staff and many valued friends. There currently is not enough official guidance to permit us to predict when the Museum can safely reopen to the public in any manner, let alone our traditional large special events. We will continue to make every reasonable effort to welcome guests back to the Museum and will make announcements on our website and in social media should the opportunity to open the campus or hold any special events present itself. The Museum thanks all of our members and supporters for their understanding and is grateful for the support we have been given in this most difficult time.

New high-def webcam added We are pleased to announce that we have added a new high-definition webcam that is accessible via our website. The camera is available via YouTube's Live Streaming service and overlooks the property from its location atop the historic light tower in our parking lot. Click here to check out our live webcams

New trolley bus acquired On May 1st our latest piece of historic equipment arrived. Dayton 9809 is a type 14TrE2 electric trolley bus built for that city by ETI in 1998 to a Skoda design. It was the last trolley bus of this type in operation and was retired in December 2019. It's one of the most modern pieces of equipment at IRM and helps fill out our unrivalled collection of historic trolley buses. Click for more information

Working from home While the state stay-at-home order has prevented all but essential work from being done on our property by volunteers, that doesn't mean that work has stopped. Many of our volunteers are working from home and making progress on restoration projects. Windows and doors are popular pieces to take home and restore, as are smaller mechanical components. Volunteers are also working on creating new and improved exhibits for our visitors, exhibits that will be assembled and available to see once we reopen. Other behind-the-scenes work includes catching up with necessary maintenance, putting together plans for future events and group offerings, and website and ticketing system upgrades. We hope that you'll like what you see when the museum reopens.

IRM's Online Sign Shop If you are looking for something to give that train lover you know, take a look at IRM's online sign shop. We have dozens of unique and historic Chicago and CTA signs for sale. All sales benefit our sign restoration efforts. Click to check out the Online Sign Shop

Planned Giving and IRM IRM has been around for more than 65 years due to the consistent support of people like you. You can help keep IRM a museum in motion for the next generation through planned giving, either by including the museum in a bequest or as a retirement account beneficiary. Click here for more information

Social Distancing

I know we're all looking forward eagerly to the day when we can open the Museum to visitors once again, and resume running our demonstration passenger trains.

But there may be problems.  I, for one, am finding it impossible to enforce social distancing at the Animated Station.  The passengers are just as rude and pushy as ever, trying to go the wrong way, blocking the exits, etc.  We'll just have to hope our visitors are more patient.