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The Restoration of Sheboygan Interurban Car 26Notes From Glenn Guerra, Master Railcar Restoration Specialist.
Eighth- 9-21-00 Return to the Car 26 main page Eighth
in the series, the last from Plymouth Hello from Plymouth::p> The first phase of the rebuilding of Car 26 is nearing completion. This will be our last open house in Plymouth, and Car 26 will be moving back to the East Troy Railroad Museum this fall. My involvement in the project is coming to an end. The volunteers at the Museum will be taking over the remainder of the rebuilding. Before I leave, Dan and Carolyn asked me to contribute one last time to the newsletter. :p> Since this will be my last report from here, I think it would be appropriate to summarize the project in Plymouth. We have an Interpretive Plan for this project that calls for us to study the car as we rebuild it, document our findings, and develop material for final displays relating to Car 26. For the study of the car, we made notes of things we saw as we took the car apart, sanded through paint layers, and prepared samples for study. The documentation for all of this consists of notes taken at the time, prepared drawings, photographs and samples that have been saved. While this type of work was going on in the shop, Dan and Carolyn were collecting information about the railroad from people who remembered it. They will tell you more about that. I think we did a good job of fulfilling the goals of the Interpretive Plan.:p> The car now looks as it did from 1908 to about 1913. We were able to determine that the car was painted 5 times in 30 years. We also determined that the varnished sash and doors on the exterior were painted in the first repainting of the car. What you see now is what the people of Sheboygan County saw when the railroad was new and the investors had high hopes for the line’s future. You also see the extravagant lettering and striping applied by the car’s builder. These cars were billboards for the companies who built them. The Cincinnati Car Company has its name on the inside of the car in 8 places. Only the most prosperous railroads could afford to keep up the paint jobs on these cars. The first repainting was much less extravagant than the original one. :p> This has been an interesting project for me, and I would like to thank all the people who supported this project and worked on it. I hope all of you enjoy this car for years to come.:p> Sincerely,:p> Glenn Guerra Seventh in the series Hello from Plymouth: Since you last heard from us, a lot has happened on this project. The body is nearing completion and work on the mechanical components is proceeding in earnest. Paul Averdung has one of the K-6 type controllers rebuilt and ready for service. He is working on the second one. Paul was able to get some new contact fingers and had to make a few contact bars for the main drum. He also provided us with the wire for the light circuits in the car and for the main trolley feed from the roof of the car. Gary Children cleaned and repaired the ceramic fuse holders and light switches. Gary has also cleaned and repainted all the clerestory window hardware. It's good to see this kind of activity. When these components are needed, they will be ready to install. As for the body here in Plymouth, the exterior has one coat of primer on it and the roof canvas has one coat of paint on it. The steps involved in painting the car will be similar to the original procedures so the appearance of this car will look like it probably did in 1908. These steps include priming the car, application of the color, varnish, lettering, and one last coat of varnish. Between all the coats, the car is sanded so the finish will be smooth. The paint used is oil based flat house paint applied with a brush and oil based varnish also applied with a brush. This explanation is a generalization of how wood cars were typically painted. Our study of the paint on this car revealed that it was painted in this manner. What is not clear to us is how many coats of color did it take to cover. A lot of written material from this era talks about four coats of color with sanding between coats two and three. When the paint coats are applied in quick succession they appear as one layer. When a paint coat is applied and then the area is repainted a few years later, a distinct line will separate the layers. At this time we are unable to determine how many coats of paint were applied for a particular layer. Since this is important historic information, we need to save some of this original paint so we will be able to differentiate the number of coats in a particular layer. This is why we have removed parts and paint chips from the car for permanent archiving. We will be able to refer back to these samples when testing is available. Another interesting thing that came out in the study of the paint was that it appears that this car was painted in the same manner until the end of its railroad life. That is, it was painted with flat color and varnished for the gloss. I was surprised to see this. Self-glossing enamel paint was talked about in the trade press as early as 1900. They did acknowledge that it did not look as good as the flat paint and varnish, but it was considerably cheaper to apply. Car 26 was painted for the fifth time by the railroad some time in the 1930's in the slow, time-consuming method. Old habits do die slowly. The interior of the car has been stripped and some of the sidewalls have been reinstalled. All the glue joints on the center bulkhead were loose, so I removed it and took it apart. The loose joints were reglued and the wall is back in the car. Most of the ceiling panels have been removed so new wires for the light circuits could be installed. Gary has been stripping paint from the ceiling panels and has them almost done. The original car numbers inside the car were found under the apple green ceiling paint that was applied by the railroad. They appear to be aluminum leaf. I am going to stop working on the interior for a while and paint the exterior so it will have some color on it by the next open house. Everyone including myself is getting anxious to see how the car will look in color. So, a lot is happening here and the job is proceeding on multiple fronts. Hope you can come to the next open house on April 9th, 2000. Sincerely, Glenn Guerra Sixth in the series THE PAINT JOB Hello Again From Plymouth, Wisconsin It has been a while since my last note to everyone. We have been busy here. First, we had a fundraising dinner in September, and then I ran off to take a class in Microscopical Identification of Paint Pigments. It has been a long time since I embarked on study like this but it was fascinating. The course is intended for art conservators who want to validate and study works of art by identifying the paint pigments used. Using a polarizing light microscope you can identify enough properties of the particles in the paint to tell what they are. As I said it has been a long time since I used the information I needed for this class and I can assure you that I am not proficient at this. I have started looking at the paint samples from car 26 and it is very interesting. Before I get into that though lets back up a little. You know from our interpretive plan that we are studying this car as we are rebuilding it. Part of that study is the paint. We want to know the various paint schemes the car had, the technique used, the materials used, and maybe something about the workers who put the paint on. To do this I developed a sampling plan that will take and catalogue samples from the car so we can study them. I have been assisted with the sampling by Linda Hart of Oostburg, Wisconsin. Let’s talk about the various pain schemes the car has had. Linda has been working in the rear vestibule sanding though the layers of paint and noting what they are. This gets tricky. It is hard to see some of the layers and you need to be careful to note where you took the sample. After she had looked at many places in the vestibule we collected and saved some samples. I then mounted some of the samples in resin and polished them. It is now very easy to identify the layers. With this information we now have a good idea of the paint schemes in the vestibule. When the car was new it was painted yellow above the windowsills and around the door on the car body. The doors and window sash were varnished. The remainder of the vestibule trim was varnished. Below the window sill the car body end wall was painted orange. At the first painting the colors were the same but the sash in the end of the car body was painted yellow. The same colors were applied for the third painting. At the fourth painting everything was painted orange. After this fourth painting the car was modified for one-man operation and air motors were installed to open the doors. This installation necessitated some modification to the car. After this rebuilding the entire vestibule was painted orange again. Through all of this the ceiling stayed yellow. It appears that the outside of the car was painted five times also. We have not finished the sampling of the out side yet and will report on that separately. I have been interested for some time in what paint is made of and what we could learn if we new. That prompted my taking the class on identification of paint pigments. I have just started my study of that but will share some of it with you. We know that this car was painted five times in its railroad life of 30 years. We think we have found paint put on by the builder of the car. Did the railroad use the same paint when it repainted the car? Was it commercially available and purchased or was in made at the site? What is the paint made of? To start with, the yellow paints are made of yellow ochre and other fillers. The orange paint is made of yellow ochre and burnt umber or a darker version of yellow ochre. This gets tricky and as I said I am a long way from being proficient at this. Yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, red ochre, and hematite are all very closely related. They are all rust. They are all iron oxide. This form of iron oxide has the ability to have a water molecule associated with it. The amount of water present affects the color. If you start with yellow ochre, which is the lightest color, and roast it you will go though all the other colors until you get to hematite, which is a red-brown color. So was the orange a mix of yellow and red or a roasted yellow? I don’t know yet. The yellow paints appear to be all the same, probably commercially purchased and maybe from the same manufacturer. The fillers appear to be the same and ground to the same size, which make me think it came from the same manufacturing process. This is all very new to me and I need to look at these samples many more time to be sure but I think it will help us to understand more out this car and the people who worked on it. One last note: the woodwork on the outside of the car is just about done. After the New Year we will be working on the interior. Thanks for checking in. Glenn Fifth in the series MODIFICATIONS TO THE CAR Hello again! Time for another note about Car 26. For this one we will talk about the modifications to the car. Like any other piece of transportation equipment Car 26 was repaired and modified. All of these past repairs and modifications are part of the history of the car and are important in the historical context of the car. To display the car it is important to know the appearance of the car in the chosen display era. In the historical context these modifications can reveal a lot of information. These modifications tell us about the railroad, the workers and maybe the economics of the railroad at the time. We can tell what service the railroad intended the car for and if that changed. The change may be a result of economics brought on by a change in society. A modification can also tell us about the skill of the workers who did the modification. Lastly, the extent of the rebuilding or modification may tell us about the financial condition of the railroad. A clever rebuilding or modification that gets the job done cheaply may indicate a good work force in a troubled company. Or, it may indicate the company felt this car was not worth a bigger investment for the use they had in mind for it. A modification done to just get by is different than one intended to last. This information can be studied long after the car is rebuilt and will be of value to people doing a history of the railroad. The loss of this information during the rebuilding of a car like this is what causes historians to shriek. They have a valid point, though. The fact that I am working on this car is compromising the validity of information contained in this car. These concerns were addressed in our interpretive plan. The interpretive plan calls for us to look at the modifications done to the car by the railroad and record them. Here are some examples of what has been found. I suspect that the end beam on the front of the car has been changed. The reasoning for this is that it is not white oak and does not have a spline join between the three pieces that comprise the end beam. I would have expected white oak based on past experience alone. The fact that the rear end beam is white oak and does have the spline joint adds to my belief that the front has been changed. If you can accept my reasoning that the front-end beam has been changed, then we can note that there are two holes for the controller wiring to pass through. We know from pictures of the cars that the cars were converted to one-man operation. We now know that the controller was moved, most likely during that conversion, and we know that the end beam was also replaced prior to that conversion. So what happened to the end beam between 1908 and about 1930? Did it rot or was the car in an accident? Another modification that appeared concerns the standee straps and handhold bar in the smoking section for standees to hold onto. The bar is mounted to the molding that covers the clerestory sill right under the clerestory windows. Behind this molding is a wiring chase that has wiring for lights in it. When this bar and these moldings were removed, two things were apparent. The first thing was the color of the finish under the bar mounts. The finish was dark, as the car appears today. In addition, the finish is wrinkled and the wrinkles are continuous under the mounts. When I took the upper sash out of the car I found areas that were finished like the interior of the car and had never been exposed to the weather or the sun. That finish was a bright golden oak. The finish is shellac and it will darken with exposure to light. So, the conclusion is that the hand hold bar was put in late in the cars’ railroad life after the finish had darkened and aged quite a bit. The next point was that the mounting screws went into the wiring and would have caused a short. This leads us to the lights. We have a newspaper article that says the car had 24 lights in it. It appears that most of these lights were at the clerestory sill. At some point the railroad changed that and the lighting was moved to the center of the clerestory. A new wiring chase was made and screwed to the ceiling. When this was removed I noted that the previous ceiling color was yellow and that it was covered with shellac that had darkened. The ceiling was later painted an apple green. This all starts to tie together. A major rebuilding took place to convert the car to one-man operation. The old lighting circuits were abandoned and a new wiring chase was installed. At that time the ceilings were painted apple green. In addition, we can also say that the hand hold bar came after this rebuilding when the old lighting circuits were abandoned. For our display of the car this information tells us that the car should be a golden oak on the inside with a yellow ceiling and the lights should be in the clerestory sill. In addition there should be no handhold bar in the smoking compartment. For the historian we now have information to add to the time line of the car. Sincerely, Fourth in the series WHERE THE MISSING PARTS GO I’m back and this time as promised we will talk about how to determine what missing parts looked like and where they go. A good example would be the ends of the car. The ends of the car suffered from the exposure and there was some work done on them. Dan Doedens informed me that he remembered his parents hiring a carpenter to remove some rotten wood and make repairs to the ends. My task is to differentiate between the carpenters work, the railroads work and that of Cincinnati Car Company. From the pictures of the car and the original car plans we know that the dash on the end of the car was curved. When I first saw the car the dash was three flat facets. The next step was to look for the carpenters work. I suspect that the carpenter removed most of the framing below the window sill. The wood was pine and held with only nails. These two things are not typical railroad construction for this location. Step one was to remove the parts installed by the carpenter. When that was done there was only one corner post at each end of the car that was intact below the window sill. From these posts I was able to determine that there were three horizontal ribs on the end of the car, their location, and the thickness of them. I also had dimensions for the post, the arch over the door, the end window trim, the drop sash tracks and the metal dash. The next step was to determine the dimensions for the center posts. The cross section of these posts could be determined from the remaining top part. The drop sash tracks had to be the same as the corner posts and so did the location of the horizontal ribs. After this I started looking for the radius and center of the curve on the end. Most copies of drawings will show small holes that are in the original drawing. I was able to find the location of the center of the curve by looking for the mark on our copy of the hole left by the draftsman's’ compass when he made the drawing. By scaling the drawing I could determine the radius and the location of the center. What comes next is the important part and I still trip myself up here. Never make any parts for an assembly until you know how the assembly goes together and that your parts will fit that assembly. Its’ easy to get ahead of yourself and rush to make some parts. Take the time to draw the parts and the assembly to see that it all works. This will also help you determine the dimensions of missing parts like the horizontal ribs. The drawings are part of your documentation for the job as well. Next see that your assembly fits the car and that what they built matches what they drew. With all that done make your parts and remember what an automobile restorer told me once. Hammer to shape, file to fit, and paint to hide. Next time we will talk about the modifications to the car. Sincerely, Third in the series WORKMANSHIP Hello again. In the last letter we talked a little about the car’s construction. This time, let’s talk about the workmanship that went into it. The interpretive plan calls for me to look at workmanship and document it. Looking at the workmanship helps us get an understanding of the manufacturing of the car and some insight into society 90 years ago. Some examples of findings are described below. When it comes to manufacturing methods, we look for indications that tell us if an operation was done using hand tools or machine tools. If hand tools or hand operation was used, we can then say that we are looking at the work of an individual. The exactness or quality of the work then is the result of that individual. So, the first thing we have learned is that the manufacture of the car relied on this particular worker’s skill for this operation- If the work is less than perfect we have to ask whether the worker less than skilled or was the worker adequate for the job. On Car 26 I have found that most of the joints in the side wall truss and the blocking were cut by hand. During the construction of the car, the location of these joints is difficult to pre-determine; so, they were cut by the carpenters that assembled the framing of the car. This is very similar to building a house today. The carpenters cut most of the joints at the site to suit the location. The next question we have to ask is: how skilled was the worker? This gets tricky because we may have some preconceived notions that we are looking for proof of. Let me describe a joint first and how it was done. The joint for the sidewall truss is a lapjoint that has a gain (a "gain" is joinery talk for a notch) in the side wall post and a gain in the truss member. It appears that the truss member was held up to the car and marked where the gains should be. The cheeks (sides) of the gain were cut with a handsaw. This was determined by the mark at the bottom of the cut. Then, the rest of the wood was removed with a chisel and hammer. This can be determined by the way the wood was chipped and my own experience. Lastly, the bottom of the gain was made reasonably flat either with the chisel or the rabbeting plane. Look at the picture of one of these joints and you will see that it is less than perfect. Was the worker less skilled, or was this level of perfection all that was required? I tend to favor the idea that the quality of the joint as executed was all that was required. On all the cars I have worked on, the quality of this and similar joints is about the time. I also think the smoothing of the joint was done with the chisel rather than the rabbeting plane. The accounting department of some car builders kept records, to the penny, of the labor cost for building a car. So was our worker good? He was probably adequate for the job and fast at his work, and I would say then that he was good in the eyes of the employer. In learning about society in the early part of this century, things left behind tell us about the workers. Inside the walls of the car I found car-parts dropped in, paper wrappers from chewing tobacco, and a whiskey bottle. Near where the whisky bottle was found, the upper sash window was missing the wood screws that were supposed to hold it in. The window was nailed in place instead. What we don't know is whether our worker and his little problem went unnoticed by the management for much longer. What I will say is that some of societies problems are not new. Next time I will talk about how determinations are made for where missing parts go. Thanks for looking at the letters. Sincerely, Second in the series Howdy! We are about 6 weeks into the rebuilding of Car 26 and the project is everything we expected it to be. Two years ago, the Friends of the East Troy Railroad Museum and the Doedens family contacted me to evaluate this car and outline the work required to rebuild it. After that evaluation, we knew the rebuilding of the car body would require about 4000 hours of work. In addition, almost all parts of the car would require some work. With this information in hand we turned our attention to developing an interpretive plan that would make the most of this rebuilding. My personal feeling is that if an artifact has historical significance, then it holds historical information in it. If we rebuild this car we want to be aware of and document the historical information in the car. This led us to the development an interpretive plan that called for us to document the construction of the car, the tools used, the materials used, the workmanship that went into it, the modifications made by the railroad, and the modifications later made by the homeowners. For this letter, let's talk a little about the construction of the car and the documentation of that construction. We have a copy of the original plans for Car 26 that was provided by Jack Keenan. This plan shows the general layout of the wall posts in a plan view and the arrangement of the wall construction in a cross-section view of the car. What is not shown are the details of the connections between the components and the rest of the framing. Furthermore, the plans and the actual car differ in some details. To document the actual construction of the car we are preparing drawings of the parts and the whole assembly as we disassemble and reconstruct this car. In doing this we will be able to retrieve information about the construction that was not saved with other Cincinnati Car Company records. It is important for us to do this at this time: now that we have worked on the car, we have compromised the validity of any information contained in this car. Let’s turn our attention to part of that construction and what we are finding. This car was built near the end of wood car body construction and shows some of the transition from wood to steel construction. The body is primarily wood. However, the main structural components are steel. The center sills are a composite construction of 6" "I" beans sandwiched in wood. The side sills an also a composite construction with steel plate sandwiched in wood. What was a surprise was the size of the steel plate in the side sill of the car. This plate is 3/8' inch thick, 24" tall and runs the length of the car. At the car body end sill, part of this plate is turned in and bolted to the end sill. This helps to secure the joint between the side sill and the end sill. In addition, the height of the plate adds considerably to the strength of the side sill. So here we have a car that relies primarily on steel for the structural support yet relies on wood for the rest of the body, I think this tells us a lot about the carbuilding industry. When all-wood cars were being made, the carbuilders had a large investment in woodworking tools. In addition, the labor force was trained to make wood parts assemble wood cars. At the time Car 26 was made, steel was getting less expensive and the carbuilding industry was switching to steel construction. This change to steel construction did not happen overnight. Steel work requires new tools that need to be designed and purchased. Furthermore, the work force needed training in steel work. So, here we see in Car 26 an illustration of the change from wood construction to steel construction. By making the drawings and taking pictures of the construction of this car we will have a permanent record of the way this car was actually built. We will also have a better understanding of the transition to all-steel construction. This is one small example of how the history contained in car 26 is being saved while we rebuild the car. Next time I will talk about some of the original workmanship. Thanks for checking in with us. Glenn Guerra First of the series Howdy! I am writing from Plymouth, Wisconsin where I am working on the restoration of the Sheboygan Light Power and Railway Company Car 26. The Friends of the East Troy Railroad Museum and The Car 26 Restoration Association have retained me to rebuild the carbody of this wood interurban coach. The Car 26 Restoration Association is based here in Plymouth, where the car ran, and there is a lot of interest in this area to see this car restored to its original, running condition. The Doedens family, former owners of the car, approached the Friends of the East Troy Railroad Museum for permission to raise the funds and rebuild Car 26 in Plymouth. They are the driving force behind the restoration project. During the course of the rebuilding we will have several open house events to show people the work in progress. I will also be reporting on the progress on this web page. About the car: Car 26 is a 1908 product of the Cincinnati Car Company. At the time it was built, the interurban industry in the country was booming. Each year more new miles of electric lines were being built than during the previous year. The interurban railway companies were becoming long distance carriers and the trade press was full of articles about how the interurban was going to compete with the steam railroad for long distance passenger service. The Sheboygan Light Power and Railway Company was expanding also. It is no accident then that Car 26 has some of the features and architecture of a steam railroad coach: the clerestory roof with drop ends, a full-width vestibule at each end, two separate seating compartments for smoking and non-smoking passengers, a toilet room, and the empire ceiling were all common on contemporary railroad coaches. This was definitely a car that the interurban intended for you to ride for some distance in relative comfort. As we know now, the aspirations of the electric railroads were not to be realized. By 1916 the electric railway industry nationwide had reached the peak for annual new mileage built, and soon after that the total system mileage had peaked. Cars purchased from this time on were more utilitarian and less opulent. The same was true for the Sheboygan Light Power and Railway Company. After the expansion to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, no more route miles were constructed. In 1938 Car 26 was sold and became a cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan near the town of Cedar Grove, Wisconsin. The Doedens family purchased the car and property in 1947. Dan Doedens was a child then and remembers the time spent with the family at the cottage. As he grew older he started to see the historical importance of the car and donated it to the East Troy Museum. Car 26 is a fine example of the short-lived boom years of the interurban industry and how Sheboygan Light Power and Railway Company was part of this transportation revolution. The car’s interior is remarkably complete, but the exterior has unfortunately suffered from long exposure to weather. About the restoration: The Interpretive Plan calls for rebuilding the car to the as-built condition. This configuration was chosen because it best represents the golden era of the interurban industry and is a period the museum would like to display in support of its representation of Wisconsin electric railroading. In addition, the Interpretive Plan calls for studying and documenting the car as it is disassembled. During my phase of the rebuilding I am charged with adhering to and supporting this interpretive plan. Some of the findings from my work, as well as photographs of the restoration process, will be presented in future additions to this web page. Thanks for checking in and be sure to look for more information as we post it. Sincerely, |
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