The
Illinois Railway Museum has been able to resume running trains, with due regard for masks, maintaining spacing, and hand washing, and that included a bit of evening running yesterday.
Hicks Car Works had
photographers on the premises yesterday, who were able to watch the steam locomotive before it suffered a bearing failure. The Cold Spring Shops team got there in late afternoon, in time to help out with some of the documentation.
The museum has cars from the first series and final series of Chicago Aurora and Elgin cars posed, as if outside the Wheaton carbarn.
Wood car 36 is from the first series of cars, all even-numbered, that the Aurora Elgin and Chicago began service with. Steel car 460 is the last traditional interurban car built in the United States, there are three cars from that fleet in varying stages of rehabilitation at the museum.
It's useful to have three cars' worth of seats in order to keep family groups in pods and individual riders at what the boffins view a safe physical distance from each other. Oh, and being able to open the windows probably helps dissipate the germs.
Yes, there are four cars in that consist. The one closest to the camera is not yet in active service. The closed-off center door and the roof free of ventilators mark it as one of the early Cincinnati steel motor cars (Chicago types call them "baldies") that were first taken out of service and rebuilt as service cars and there aren't as many of them in preservation, let alone being put back in passenger carrying shape. The three cars ahead, which have roof ventilators, were "plushies" (because of the seating) which were the last cars to go out of service, concurrent with the conversion of the Evanston service to third-rail power collection. Thus, there are a lot of those in service, in Illinois, Wisconsin, and maybe a few other places.
One of these days, the entrance to the museum will be through a visitor center and the visitor will step out into a replica Chicago street scene (there is an actual commercial strip that somebody has in mind, commercial buildings not exceeding three stories) with a streetcar line running through it.
In the neighborhoods, the L was a surface level operation. Still true at the outer ends of the Evanston, Ravenswood, and Douglas Park lines. Thus, the visitor could board a streetcar and ride it to the local steam railroad station, or walk to the L station.
Yup, see you that four car steel train and raise you four wooden cars, each of which required a LOT of work to be in the shape you see them.
Same cars, almost the same spot, September 1967, John Karlson photograph.
Helps to have an indoor shop to work on the cars and indoor storage space to protect them from the elements. The cars made the final late night run of the day, loading and discharging at 50th Avenue, which is closest to the exits, although there was space to board a few passengers at the East Union station.
I opted to head home rather than go for a ride, the cash paying visitors are riding by reservation and museum members who ride on passes will get other opportunities. I'll close, though, with one of the compromises railway preservation forces on us. Do you see it?
In real life, the Santa Fe sign was atop a building on the west side of Michigan Avenue, and the Illinois Central suburban trains (there's a set in the gloaming on the west track at 50th Avenue) were in a trench on the east side of Michigan. A commuter could see the front of the Santa Fe sign. Here, the Illinois Central cars have passed to the east of what was the west side of the sign. Sometimes you just have to compromise.
