!At The Throttle!

“I am glad to learn that the Parliament Bill has been passed for the Darlington Railway.” - George Stephenson (1781-1848) “Father of the railway” and designer/builder of the Rocket. Odds and ends . . . In the latest edition of the CAGRS Newsletter, you were introduced to the beginnings of a restoration of a Bock Lumber Company Forney recently acquired by Fred Haberkamp. Fred will be keeping us up to date as the restoration progresses on this gem. I’m looking forward to the stories that will accompany this project. In the Live Steam magazine, they have been following the design and building of a 3 ¾ inch gauge locomotive. In the latest edi-tion, they told of the design and building of the front pilot (cowcatcher). It required ten pages to cover directions, manufacturing of parts, and assembly of JUST the pilot. This has been a long running series. We will share Fred’s adventure through the newsletter with photos. Obviously, there is a lot to follow. I have seen the extremes of “aging” on different layouts throughout the various open houses that we share. The engines and equip-ment may be relatively new and the owners have kept them in pristine shape. In other layouts, they have intervened and given them a rugged and well-worn look. My wife Gayle is one who likes her train projects and equip-ment to have the new look. Lately she has

tackled a project that defies her norm. She “rescued” a church from the layout of the late Walter Radtke. When she first acquired it, the sun had bleached it to a creamy white and it needed a good scrubbing to remove old paint. In stepped Gayle with soapy water, brushes, and paint. It now looks old and will be getting some additional aging as this pro-ject proceeds. Its basic shape is that of a small village church in England that fits well with that part of our railway. We don’t have a name for the church or denomination other than “Walter’s church” - and that’s good enough for me. If you have a short story to share about your comings and goings with your railroad, for-ward it to us and we’ll put you in print. There are some stories to be told out there.

Keep ‘em running, Madison

Volume 20, Number 4 April 2017

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CHCAGO AREA GARDEN RAILWAY SOCIETY

http://cagrs.com

Officers President, Madison Parker

630-851-4056 madisonparker@yahoo.com

Vice President, Lorrie Rockey 630-709-6957

lorrier@railroad-crossing.com

Treasurer, Wayne Clauss wayneclauss@yahoo.com

Secretary, Dora Mecko meckoboat@sbcglobal.net

Chairpersons Membership, Jim FioRito

1204 Sunnybrook Drive Naperville, IL 60540

630-219-4567 jlfio@sbcglobal.net

Open Houses, Beth and Steve March

847-367-5175 MarchS@aol.com

WebMaster, Ray Sargent 630-766-5738

admin@cagrs.com lantern

Newsletter Editor, John Peart

773-973-0217 cagrsnews@outlook.com

Caring and Sharing, Carol Veldhuizen

817-437-2978 Carolv712@sbcglobal.net

Newsletter PRINTER,

The Ink Well (847) 923-8060

The elections are now here. It will be run at our April monthly meeting on April 23. At the end of our meeting on Mach 26 another volunteer threw his hat into running for the office of Vice President. The following are the candidates: Vice President Joe Lienau Karen Morelli Treasurer Wayne Clauss If anyone wants a mail in ballot please contact me or Pen-ny immediately. I will not send out ballots after April 11. All ballots must be returned to me by April 17 to be counted.

Thanks

Fred Haberkamp President Columbia Metal Spinning p 773-685-2800 f 773-685-4328 Craft Metal Spinning p 773-685-4700 f 773-685-8053 4351 N. Normandy Ave. Chicago, IL 60634 fred@cmspinning.com

John Koelle has Accucraft to Aristo Craft to LGB to USA trains for sale. If you are interested, please call John at 847-607-8789

2017 Spring Election

Fred Haberkamp Penny Haberkamp

For Sale

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The monthly meeting was held on Sunday, March 26, 2017 at the Holiday Inn in Itasca, IL. Attendees: Paul Allodi, Ron & Gayle Althardt, Alan An-derson, Ed Biesiadecki, Ken Carlsen, Wayne & Jan Clauss, Bob & Laurie DeFoe, Joe Dio-rio, Jim Fiorito, Dietrich Gruchot, Fred & Pen-ny Haberkamp, Paul Hough, Butch Huvaere, Alex Kowalski, Grant Law, Joe & Mary Lou Lienau, Dora Mecko, Ron & Martha Messner, Madison & Gayle Parker, John Peart, Bernie & Dolores Rich, Lorrie Rockey, Bill & Shirley Rustemeyer, Judy Rustemeyer, Robert Rustemeyer, Don Rustemeyer, David Silver-ton, Donna & Jim Snorek, Bob & Mary Walsh, Wayne Zoeteman (41) Announcements: Golden Oldies Party scheduled for April was cancelled due to a lack of participation. There were only 14 reservations, two days before the cut-off date. The club commit-ment was for 40 with the restaurant. 2017 Elections for the Vice-President and Treasurer will be held during the April 23rd meeting. Wayne Clauss has volunteered to run for Treasurer again. Karen Morelli advised she’d like to run for VP. (Editor: Joe Lienau is also running for VP.) It is not too late, if you would also like to throw your hat into the ring. Contact Fred & Penny Haberkamp (fred@cmspinning.com). Judy Rustemeyer will be assisting the day of the elections PSA…Joe Lienau brought in a lengthy list of various discounts available to senior citizens. The list covered restaurants, travel, hotels,

stores and many activities. See Joe for a copy. Raffle: Butch Huvaere designed and built a “switch changer” which he brought to the meeting to raffle off. The happy winner was Dietrich Gruchot. Word of the Day (Grant Law) Callipygian - From Ancient Greek (kalli-, “beautiful”) + (pugḗ, “buttocks”). callipygous - Referring to a statue of Aphro-dite. Old Business: None New Business: None Reports:

Vice President, Lorrie Rockey: SPRING PRUNING …. “Whacking back”, clearing out debris/dead plants for new growth to come in. Make a plan so you know where you want new items to be planted. Consider having an open house. Even if your train layout isn’t complete, it is good for members to see “a work in progress”. Share your plan/imagination with those that can help you. Secretary, Dora Mecko: The cancellation of the Golden Oldies party occurred after the February minutes were sub-mitted. Treasurer’s Report, Wayne Clauss: The checking account balance as of March 25, 2017, was $25,779.94. The CD balance was $10,220.75. Membership, Jim Fiorito: 117 current mem-berships; 19 have not renewed. An email will be sent out again, as a reminder. Editor Report, John Peart: None Caring and Sharing: Email info to Carol Veldhuizen Carolv712@sbcglobal.net 817-437-2978

CAGRS

Meeting Minutes March 26, 2017

by Dora Mecko Secretary

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Contact Steve & Beth March, if you plan to have an open house this year. Contact Ron Messner for club shirts (long & short sleeve available). Contact Judy Rustemeyer for the new CAGRS wind breakers which are available for purchase in different sizes. Ron Althardt has club pins available. Comments: The next meeting will be Sunday, April 23, 2017 at the Holiday Inn in Itasca. Presenter: Bruce Moffat…Underground Tunnel System. Reminder…Elections for Vice-President and Treasurer will be held during the April meeting. Reminder. Sunday, May 7, 2017 3:00pm… CAGRS Board Meeting… Althardt Resi-dence. It is open to all club members. A sign-up sheet will be passed around at the April meeting. We need to know in advance,

the number of attendees. After the Board meeting, dinner will be served. Cost: $10 per person.

Presentation: Ed Biesiadecki “Clang, Clang Went the Trolley” (1944 trolley song from “Meet Me in St Louis”) Ed brought in several of his beautiful trolley cars he built over the years. He explained in great detail the work involved in building one from a kit. He advised that although it isn’t difficult, it involves great patience and dexteri-ty. His first one took nine months to complete. The kits include good directions, templates and parts. Ed advised he laminates his direc-tions prior to starting. He also said he “paints as he goes” because it is too difficult to do af-ter the trolley is built. Some of his trolley ba-ses have approximately 400 full/half bricks which are painted, grouted and sealed. He rec-ommended the “Berlin” ($140) to be a good trolley to start with. Ed had a great video of his indoor train/trolley layout. OCCRE USA ---good site for train and ship

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models. http://www.occreusa.com/tram.html http://www.agesofsail.com http://www.cornwallmodelboats.co.uk Madison adjourned the meeting. Contact Madison Parker if you have any com-ments, recommendations or ideas for presenta-tion topics for future meetings. Phone: 630-851-4056 630-542-9062 Email: madisonparker@yahoo.com

Respectfully submitted, Dora Mecko, Secretary

April Birthdays Judy Berghas Liz Dolgner Bonnie Frels Geri Garstecki Dietrich Gruchot Frances McTague Beth March Steve March Robert Rustemeyer Connie Smith Cindy Starzyk Carol Veldhuizen April Anniversaries Jan and Wayne Clauss Paulette and Craig Pecora Harry and Fay Sorenson Carol and Terry Veldhuizen

Publicizing Your Open House One of the advantages of being a member of the Chicago Area Garden Railway Society is to visit other member’s layouts to see how they do things and to invite others to see your exceptional layout. The key to exploiting this membership advantage is the schedule of member open houses in the Society monthly newsletter. Three members are involved in maintaining the open-house schedule; the newsletter editor, the schedule editor and you. And it all begins with you. Look over your summertime activi-ties and choose a Sunday, between now and the first of October, when you wish to invite members to view your layout. In choosing your date think about how many other layouts will be open on that date. Fewer open layouts means more people coming to your layout. Another consideration is the amount of driving members must do to get to your house. Our membership lives between Antioch in the north and somewhere in northwest Indiana. If it would be convenient for you, pick a date that other members living in your county have al-ready picked. The advantage being that others have only to drive around in one county to see all the layouts on a Sunday. Next send me an e-mail including your name and open-house date. Within one week I will reply sending you the description you used when last you had an open house. If I don’t have a file copy of your description, I’ll ask you to create one using those in the current newsletters as a guide. Return the corrected description to me, preferably as an electronic file attached to your e-mail. If I have ques-tions or suggestions about your description, we may have a short discussion over the tele-phone.

Caring & Sharing Corner

Carol Veldhuizen Caolv712@sbcglobal.net

817-437-2978

2017 Summer Layout Tours

Steve March

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Finally, I send the description, your home ad-dress, GPS coordinates and e-mail address to the newsletter editor who has final say over what goes into the newsletter. The editor has a deadline, one week after the monthly meeting, so please start your part of the process well in advance of that deadline. If you have any questions please call me, Ste-ve March (1.847.367.5175), and I be glad to explain further. I hope to see your submission soon.

From the Fort Wayne Railroad Website

COMING JUNE 17th & 18th THE JOLIET ROCKET ARRIVE IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO BEHIND A 1940s STEAM LOCOMO-TIVE We wanted to let you know that we'll be re-turning to the Chicagoland area with THE JO-LIET ROCKET and are partnering with Metra once again to bring you one of our most unique excursion offerings in years! Passengers will enjoy a high-speed, two hour round trip excursion featuring a photo runby and open vestibules (where available) and thrill to an exclusive VIP layover complete with live music, vintage cocktails, appetizers and much more at LaSalle Street Station. THE JOLIET ROCKET will feature: . locomotive no. 765 under steam . locomotive cab tours . live music by the Farmland Jazz Band . vintage cocktails provided by The Violet Hour

. appetizers served by North Island Catering . photo opportunities . historical reenactors . best dressed award CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS, CAR ATTEND-ANTS Interested in volunteering for this or another trip behind the 765? Our car attendants provide valuable customer service to our passengers during our excur-sions, proudly represent the railroad historical society (and of course get to ride our trains for free.) If you have experience in customer ser-vice or retail, appreciate railroading or consid-er yourself a "people person," we'd love to in-vite you aboard. Click here to email Brad Mo-rocco, Passenger Services Supervisor, with your interest. This is a great opportunity for couples, fami-lies, young adults or new volunteers interested in experiencing the challenges and excitement of mainline steam railroading. Training will be held in April or May .

Garden Railway Magazine is doing a 3 part series on “Designing your Railway” Part 1 is “Organize your Plan”. Part 2 is “Focus on the Theme” and Part 3 is “Detail with Pair-ings” There are also a number of references to books and websites which can help the begin-ner. And of course, there are always your fel-low CAGRS’ members ready to give advice.

Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society Inc.

Brian Valleau

Must Read for Beginners

Editor

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THE BUILDING OF THE BOCK LUMBER COMPANY FORNEY Part 2

By Fred Haberkamp

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Now that I have a semi full of parts just what do we do from here. Of course, the first thing is we need a set of plans so we can fig-ure out how to put everything together. The only thing I got from my predecessor was the line specification sheet, erecting card and the picture that was in the Baldwin cata-log (last month’s picture). Well this is easy now. I’ll call on a couple friends to chase things down for me—Larry Cerwin and Brain Valleau— This did not turn out to be as easy as we hoped for. When Baldwin went out of business they turned the majority of their rec-ords over to the ‘De Golyer Library at South-ern Methodist University. After researching and discussing things for several weeks it turned out that what we had was all anyone could find, but NO PRINTS. There were several leads where some parts of the Baldwin records were with different Libraries and Museums. After sever-al month’s it became obvious that there was nothing related to our Forney. We do have the history of where and when they both ran until they were taken apart for scrap. This is when a steam enthusiast bought the parts so that one day he would rebuild it. Fast forward to now—he sold it to me after letting things sit in his yard for over 15 years. Now the hard part, checking out what we had and taking a guess as to how it might go together. This is where my relationship with Dave Kloke paid off. From building the Leviathan and the York from scratch his mechanical instinct sorted out all the parts and came up with the majority of the needed parts to build the en-gine from frame down. On a negative note, whoever took things apart were not careful and cut many compo-nents apart with a torch. Many parts needed to be repaired and some had to be replaced. Since both engines were very close in size to each other I had a decision as to which engine

would I build? Yes, I thought just build them both J. I had to be realistic so we broke things down. The Bock Lumber had a steam saddle with the cylinders of 9” X 14”, the main drive wheels, frame and 2/3 of the cross mem-bers, swing gear, bearing housings and eccen-tric linkage and the original boiler.(another story). The Elk River had no steam saddle (this would be about a $50,000 dollar casting), frame that was a little heavier and 2 feet long-er, (this engine when built had a steam donkey (winch) on the back—removed before 1st year was over—they couldn’t decide if the winch was pulling the huge redwood logs to the train or the logs pulling the engine over on its side) both main wheel and the trailing wheels, all hubs and eccentrics sized for a 9” X 16” stroke plus a lot of cross members and straps. I’ve always said bigger is better so we took the frame from the Elk River (larger one), Steam saddle from the Bock Lumber, Eccentrics from the Bock, cross member from both, Swing gear assembly from the Bock, Main drive wheels from the Bock (now both wheel pins and eccentrics matched the 9” X 14”), trailing wheels and pivot assem-bly from the Elk River, and the boiler from Bock Lumber. (see Photo 1, 2 and 3) If you ever want to see a boiler from 1908 with NO WELDING I have it at my plant. This will be another story later. We took the next year to repair and re-place frame sections. Sand blast and primer paint sections and assemble frame parts. Send out the main wheels to have new pins quar-tered and installed with new tires. Had the Cylinders on the Steam saddle bored .030 over to clean up. (still within spec.) You have to understand that this all had to be worked around my schedule at work and the school on Fridays and/or Saturdays,

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Photo 1.

Photo 2.

Dave’s time finishing building the Lincoln Fu-neral car, a couple years of both of us running the Leviathan and traveling with the Funeral Car. We will discuss the boiler next issue. By Fred Haberkamp

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Photo 3

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CAGRS JACKETS

Judy Rustemeyer is the Jacket Lady for the club.. Jacket Order Form: Name:_______________________________ Address: _____________________________ Phone: _______________________________ Make Checks Payable to CAGRS Contact Judy Rustemeyer 6067 N. Newburg Avenue, Chicago, IL 60631 312-513-2227

——————————————————————————— CAGRS SHIRTS

Ron Messner is our Shirt Man. Our members are seen here in the photo wearing our smartly styled denim versions with logo. The shirts are availa-ble with short or long sleeves.

All shirts are available in sizes Small thru XXXL. The Polo short sleeve version is $28. for all sizes. The denim shirts are $30 for all sizes and sleeve styles. Please contact Ron for his in-ventory. You can contact him by phone, email, or at a CAGRS monthly meeting to place your order.

Ron Messner 4936 Berenice Chicago, IL 60641 Ronmarstation@sbcglogal.net 773-794-1779

OFFICIAL CAGRS CLUB LOGO SHIRTS AND JACKETS

AVAILABLE

Coming Up this Month

April 9 Great Midwest Train Show, Wheaton, 9 am April 23 Meeting and Annual Elections (Vice-President and Treasurer) (Get Absentee ballots from Fred Haberkamp)

Coming Up Later May 7 CAGRS Spring Board Meeting (Althardt Residence) May 7 Great Midwest Train Show, Wheaton, 9 am May 21 May Meeting, Holiday Inn, Itasca, 5:30 June 17-18 Joliet Rocket Steam Train Rides, (Joliet to Chicago) July 10-15 2017 National Garden Railway Convention, Tulsa, OK

Chicago Area Garden Railway Society 1204 Sunnybrook Drive Naperville, IL 60540