Weekend Report

Many thanks again to our intrepid freelance photographer Steven, who has sent a raft of photos detailing restoration work performed on several projects over the weekend.

Let's start with the progress on Illinois Terminal 1565, our Class B electric locomotive, which was removed from service due to contactor problems. These were traced to badly worn pins in the Type M contactors that were preventing them from opening and closing properly. This weekend, the final replacement pins were machined, the final contactor was rebuilt, and the first 17 of the rebuilt contactors were installed by Steven, Mikey, and Brian.

Contactor #8 on the bench in a state of disassembly.

Turning new pins on the lathe. Each was custom turned to fit its contactor.

Mikey and Brian proudly display the final contactor to be rebuilt. Those smiles say "thank God this is the last one!"

Reinstalling 40 contactors into the cramped quarters inside the Class B isn't for the faint of heart.

Here you can see a disassembled contactor, with the motor circuit wires hanging down and the magnetic coil to lift the contactor visible behind the arc chute.

At the end of the night, the red golf cart had largely turned white thanks to the snow.

Steven also helped bring the Eclipse fenders for the 18 into the shop from out in Barn 4 and got some photos of the action.

Above, you can see the better of our two donor fenders with the "fence" folded outward. Below is the worse of the two donors with its fence folded over the basket.

Below, Frank Kehoe, yours truly in the green hat, Good Nick to the right, and Steven J all helped get these into the shop.

That pipe sticking out at the bottom has completely rusted through, but it's supposed to go into the T-shaped casting just to the right of Frank's hand. The T casting also has a tab where the "fence" attaches to the rest of the fender.

And finally, in more IT news, Steven, Mikey, and Brian worked on meggering the motors and air compressor on the 1702. The results were surprisingly good.

Above, the inside of the line car. Note the coal stove to the left!

The view looking west from up on the roof, with the 1754, 1808, and 306 evident.

Above and below, Mikey and Brian contorting themselves to get good megger readings on the 1702's four GE 73 traction motors. The worst of the four read at about 8 megohms, which is very good, especially for motors this old that haven't been touched in 50+ years.

Below can be seen eight of the line car's 13 type DB-41 contactors.

Thanks again to Steven for sending these great photos!

A New Fender

Frank writes...

Sunday was a day of good progress, thanks in large part to Frank Kehoe, who made an unusual weekend appearance and worked with me for much of the afternoon on the Eclipse fender for Shaker Heights 18.

"The what now?" you ask. Well, good question. Eclipse was a company that made streetcar fenders, basically baskets mounted to the front of streetcars that would "catch" any pedestrians struck by the car and prevent them from going under the wheels. In some cities, such as Los Angeles, fenders like this were required by municipal ordinance for decades. Cleveland Railway used fenders on its 1200-series cars for many years, and so did Shaker Heights Rapid Transit, though SHRT modified the design somewhat. Shaker Heights stopped using these fenders sometime around 1950, I think, so car 18 can be operated correctly either with or without a fender (various in-service photos can be found here). But it's the only car at IRM that had this type of fender in service, so of course, we've got to install one.

IRM received three fenders in various stages of disrepair as part of the Trolleyville acquisition in 2010. It should be possible to combine parts from the two better ones to make one good one, so on Sunday, Nick, Steven J, and Frank Kehoe helped me haul the two fenders from out in Barn 4 into the shop. Above, the better one is on sawhorses while the worse one is on the floor.

The fender consists of an outer frame of 1-1/4" pipe, with two elbow castings at the corners and two T-shaped castings along the sides, each unique (lefts and rights are not the same); a main "basket" of woven steel strap; and a rear "fence" of vertical steel strap. On the better fender, the basket and fence are in good shape but one elbow casting is missing, the second cracked, and a couple of the pipes are rusted clean through. Above, you can see a T-casting with a bolt that serves as a hinge for the "fence."

At the "top" corners, the pipes that form the sides of the fender attach to the car's bumper using this method. The attachment casting sticks into the end of the pipe and is held in place by a large cotter pin, long since rusted totally solid. We had to drill out and/or grind off the cotter pins to extract these castings.

Here's Frank pulling one of the T-castings off the end of the pipe after we removed the attachment castings and the "fence." It took a lot of Kroil and elbow grease, but we got the pipe frame pretty well disassembled. Frank then spent a while cleaning all the rust and oxidized pipe pieces out of the castings. We'll order new pipe to replace the rusted sections and we're getting new steel strap to replace the pieces where the basket is attached to the frame. I also sand-blasted and primed the two attachment castings, so those are ready to paint black and then be reinstalled when we get to the reassembly stage. A huge thank you to Frank for his work on this project!

The only other work done on the 18 was to remove the two "temporary" windows that are currently in the car and give them a quickie coat of cream paint. The one on the left is an original Shaker window (though not from the 18) in very poor shape, while the one on the right is a CA&E 318 window. They're just being used until work is completed on new replacement windows, but in the meantime, the paint will make the car look better.

There was exciting news from Illinois Terminal land. First, Mikey and Brian got the last of the new pins for the Class B's contactors machined, meaning the contactors are all rebuilt and ready to go back on the locomotive. They and Steven J also installed a number of the rebuilt contactors.

And out in Barn 4, Mikey, Brian, and Steven J crawled under IT 1702 to take a good look at its electrical and mechanical condition for the first time in many years. The car's reverser was rebuilt by Carl Illwitzer back in the 1980s or 1990s, so that's in excellent condition. The motors, which we've never touched, were also found to megger very well - the worst was 8 megohms, with the others around 10-12 megs. So that is extraordinarily good news. The air compressor also meggered very well, so hopes are high that the 1702 may be able to make air and motivate itself once a full inspection and some cleaning and maintenance can be done. They also looked at the contactor box, shown above. Mikey found a badge plate: these are DB-41 contactors, so that's a pretty early type, I'd say. The design is pretty similar to the DB-131 contactors under the 308 and 409, but these are beefier. They also have a different interlock design that sits underneath the contactor and more closely resembles the DB-15 interlock.

Besides this, Richard and Bus Steven were spray-painting detail parts for the Milwaukee Marmon while Joel and Nick spent a fair amount of time tending to Happy Holiday Railway-related tasks like turning on, and later turning off, a huge number of light strings, inflatables, and other attractions. Jimmy was also out but was drafted to be the conductor on the 4391. The event seemed to get off to an excellent start on its inaugural weekend, even with some snow on Sunday morning. Many thanks to all the volunteers working to make it happen!

Help Solve a Mystery

We'd like to extend our thanks these days to Art Peterson, who has been sending some terrific historic photographs that are helping flesh out our Stephen Scalzo history articles on Illinois electric railways. We've already added some fascinating photos from Art's collection to the Kewanee & Galva, Lee County Central, and Woodstock & Sycamore pages and there are more to come. Remember, if you read the blog on mobile, scroll to the bottom and hit "desktop view" or "web page view" every so often to check out recent updates in the right column.

Anyway, one of Art's recently submitted photos is a mystery, and we're hoping we can crowd-source some information. The photo below was marked K&G, suggesting Kewanee & Galva. But the car isn't quite a match for the K&G's two heavyweight interurban cars, cars 51 and 52, though there are a lot of similarities in the car's design.

Any suggestions of what railroad this car is from are appreciated! It's a combine, probably (though we can't say with certainty) built by Niles, same as K&G 51-52. It's two windows shorter than the K&G's cars, with five paired windows rather than six. Spotting features include that wide post at the front corner; single window behind the baggage door with a wide post on either side; window guards; built-in markers over the front windows; and what looks like a removable destination board next to the rear door. It also has MCB trucks, or at least did until it went into the ditch!

EDIT: I posted this on Facebook and within a couple of hours an answer appeared: it's the Youngstown & Ohio River on December 10, 1920. There's even another photo of this incident online here.

Weekend Photo Album

Many thanks to Steven, who was out volunteering throughout the weekend and sent this terrific photo album of what he and others were working on.

Saturday evening started with Steven and Jimmy clearing gravel out of the flangeways outside the new east end of Barn 4 so that the 18 and the Army 45-tonner wouldn't derail going into the barn.

Afterward, as shown above and below, Steven, Jimmy, and Joel did the switch move to extract the 18 from track 73 and move it over to the inspection pit. The "Matchbox" came out first and went back in first; it doesn't have working heat and won't be used for Happy Holiday Railway, so it will be buried behind the 18 and 4391. The 4391 is shown above, nicely it up with the 1374 behind it in Yard 7, and below back in Barn 7 on track 73.

Below is the 18 motoring out to the tail track.

And below, the 45-tonner pushes the car through the new Barn 4 extension and into the old building. You can just barely see behind the car where new plywood walls have been erected - the contractor installed these and some access doors (but not the track doors) during the week. Steven got some video of the 18 being moved into the shop here - at the beginning and end you can hear the odd crackling and popping sounds as the car flattens the foam in the flangeways.

And below, the 18 in the nice newly concreted and unusually clean shop.

Below, we move to Sunday, and a much better and more extensive photo essay of the work that was done on the 18 than I managed to accomplish. First, Greg is at ground level keeping an eye on the air compressor. One challenge of putting the car where the air compressor is over the pit is that the doors are almost inevitably going to be in mid-air. I need to build a plywood bridge plate that can sit across the rail so we don't have to keep using ladders to get into the car.

And below, a nice view of the air compressor from inside the car. This National BB2 has the motor mounted over the pump, as opposed to WABCO pumps which more often mount the motor alongside the pump, I think. Anyway, if you want to see what a minor compressor flashover looks like, here you go. Audio has been removed to make it a bit more, ah, family-friendly...

Anyway, after that, we proceeded to clean, slot, and stone the commutator, which seems to have had the desired effect, at least for now. Below is yours truly, lying down on the job yet again. I think this may be while I was using a small tool to clean out the slots in between the commutator segments.

Below, Richard uses a small stone at the end of a plastic handle to gently grind burrs off the commutator. During this part of the operation, the pump was run on a welder so that it turned relatively slowly and only had low voltage on it.

Fast forward to the evening, and Steven spent white a while thoroughly vacuuming the car out. Below is a shot looking forward from just aft of the drop section.

As you can see, we moved the car back a few feet (this time, now that the pump was working better, under power and not with manual car movers!) so that the doors were accessible.

Below is a neat photo from the inspection pit, standing under the front end of the car looking back. At the very top left is one of the grid boxes, which are located under the front end of the car, and to the right are some junction boxes and switches for the MU system. The car has Tomlinson couplers so there are devices for automatically cutting in and out the electrical and air connections. To the right, just over that water bottle, you can see an air hose pointing down, which is missing on the left... I'll add that to the to-do list. Even just from this photo you can probably see that the car has compromise treads that are wider than "tram wheel" treads.

Here's a mouse's-eye view of the front half of the car looking up toward the cab, though this is taken from the drop section, so this is the view of any shorter person when they board the car. Note the car's nice new stool, courtesy of Joel's Home and Interurban Car Furnishings, Ltd.!

And a final shot of the 18 after the barn lights were turned off. That reminds me, I need to get some more repro car cards to fill in some of the gaps in the ad card racks...

And now we go back in time to earlier on Sunday and look at some other projects and happenings around the museum. First, a view of our Bee Line over-the-road motor coach in storage in the Hoffman Garage. This bus is complete but needs quite a bit of cosmetic work.

And speaking of bus cosmetic work, here's Milwaukee 441, which just came back from the paint shop.

Here are a couple of bumper pieces of the 441 that Bus Steven was cleaning up. These will be sent out to get chrome-plated.

The bumper on the rear of the bus, shown below, is painted silver.

Steven spent some time helping Joel move spare parts that we just acquired into storage. Below are a couple of items on a pallet. I believe these are consolidated glottis assemblies.

It may be hard to tell, but the milk crate and boxes in the foreground hold trolley shoes - a lot of them. Parts like this that are consumables are extremely valuable since we go through them! Thanks to the whole gang that went to pick up these spare parts.

Hey, know anyone who could use a paint striper for putting stripes on roads or sidewalks? We got 'em - cheap!

Jewell Road History

Dave Diamond sent us two pictures of the Jewell Road shelter in 1949 which I hadn't seen before, and so far these are the first pictures I've seen of its original location. 

The first is looking northwest from the Jewell Road crossing.  It appears to me there was no sign over the door, as I would have expected from the other similar shelters.  And we don't have a sign, so perhaps it disappeared at an early age.  The manual semaphore appears to be located directly in front of the door.  There's a good-sized parking lot.  And it looks like the station has its own mailbox -- why???

The second is looking southeast.  Electric Avenue is seen in the distance, parallel to the track.  The building appears to be slightly tilted forward.

 Our thanks to Dave for making these available!

Air Compressor Work

Frank writes...

Sunday was "air compressor day" on Shaker Heights 18. Thanks to Joel and the crew, who used a diesel to bring the car over to Barn 4 and put it on the inspection pit Saturday evening. After already having been the first car inside the new barn extension, this time the 18 was the first car over the new concrete. The flangeways were kept clear of concrete with strips of insulating foam, so that made for an odd squeaky sound as it was compressed by the car's flanges. But I digress.

Here's how the car looked when I showed up. With all the new unblemished concrete, and equipment cleared away from the walls, the shop looks amazingly professional these days! Thanks to Matthew and Jimmy, who helped move the car a few feet east with manual "car movers" so that the compressor - located just aft of the doors - was over the pit.

The first order of business was removing and cleaning the bottle valves, which had been sticking. Richard Schauer showed me how this all worked and how to clean them. Once we had the process down, it went quickly, even with the cramped quarters underneath the car (this is where the pit was a huge help). Above, the brass bottle valve body on the left and the steel sleeve on the right were removed for each of the four valves, brought into the shop, cleaned out, oiled, and reinstalled.

The 18's pump has also occasionally been blowing fuses on startup, which is obviously undesirable. No permanent damage has been done - yet - but we wanted to fix this before these minor flashovers became major. Here you can see the top view of the National BB2 air compressor (the only one in our collection) through the inspection hatch in the floor of the car, Richard worked with Steven J, Greg, and myself to inspect, wipe down, slot, and then stone - basically, smooth out - the commutator, which makes the brushes ride much more smoothly and reduces arcing and "ring fire," a cause of minor flashovers. The stoning was done using a welder so that the pump could be run at (relatively) low speed and on low voltage. Following this work, the pump ran much more cleanly and evenly. With the bottle valve work, it also stopped "wheezing" due to sticking valves, and pumped up faster. Success! Many thanks to everyone who helped with this. Knock on wood, but hopefully the pump will perform better going forward.

After all this work, Steven J spent quite a while thoroughly vacuuming the car, which it badly needed, while I cleaned a few windows, bolted down the rest of the seat cushions, and cleaned all the random parts and tools out of the car. We even located a stool for the motorman, courtesy of the department head - thanks, Joel!

If you're wondering why we've been working on the 18 almost every weekend, the answer is that we want it available as a possible backup car for Happy Holiday Railway. We like to have two streetcars out for HHR, but only the 3142 has fully working heat right now: the heat in the 4391 is, shall we say, lackluster. For cool days, that's fine, but if we have any really frigid HHR days, that can be punishing for riders and especially for the crew, who are on the car all day and not just for 10 minutes. So, the 18, which happens to have quite functional heat, has been called upon. We'll see - if we have a spate of warm days, the 3142 and 4391 may be sufficient for this year's event.

In other news, Greg and Steven J spent much of the day sanding the 415 over in Barn 2, though I didn't stop by to get any photos. And there was bus work being done: above, "Bus Steven" is wire-wheeling bumper components for Milwaukee trolley bus 441, which is glistening right behind him at the north end of the Hoffman Garage. Later in the day, these bumper parts received primer.

Doodlebug Bob was also working on contactor parts for IT 1565 and Joel was busily running the forklift to put some recently acquired spare parts into protected storage. Above, I spotted this nifty artifact that was just donated by a generous supporter in Ohio: the original Lombard station sign from the CA&E. We'll work on finding a nice place to display this!

Shelter Progress

 Some more progress was made on the Jewell Road shelter on Saturday.  I brought out the final pieces needed for the door frame and installed them.  It's hard to see from here, but the trim strips help keep rainwater from leaking into the building.

I also found a piece of wood that I can use for making a threshold piece.  As you can see, the floor is pretty rotted out where it extends out from under the door.  That can be fixed.

And I found a ladder in the barn that I could use for scraping down and painting the top section of the south side.

So it now looks a little better.  I can only hope another nice day comes along unexpectedly, so I can put finish paint on the rest of the front.  

Finally, a lot of people were working on various aspects of getting ready for Happy Holiday Railways, which starts next Friday.  This is one of the most exciting times of the year.  Probably I should have taken more pictures, but here's the North Western bilevel train after a test trip.

There are still a few positions open, so sign up now before it's too late!

You don't want to be unhappy!