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Built, Painted, and Operated by Phil O'Keefe |
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Built, Painted, and Operated by Phil O'Keefe |
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Continued...
The picture above shows the side view of Blue Goose 7028. Chicago ordered just 83 pre-war PCC cars in 1936, and they never became legends like the Green Hornets. Like the Green Hornets, they also had an oddly unique door arrangement and body width. Passengers entered through the front and exited through the middle and back doors. These cars ran primarily on Madison Street until the post-war cars arrived, then they were used on Western Avenue, 63rd Street, and Cottage Grove Avenue. One car did manage to operate for a short time on Milwaukee Avenue. The pre-war PCCs far out-lived their post-war sisters by operating almost to the end of streetcar service. The destination signs on the model are for the "63 63rd Street" line and the destination is for Stoney Island Boulevard on the east end of the line.
A post-war PCC and pre-war PCC pass on the street in front of the Calumet Coal Company. Before the switch to natural gas in the late 1940's and the 1950's, there were many neighborhood coal yards in Chicago like this. Most were next to viaducts (as we call street underpasses in Chicago), where a hopper car could be unloaded on an elevated unloading track to the bins below.
My layout is very small by most people's standards. It consists of two sections bolted together. The first section is basically rectangular and measures 3 feet by 6 feet. The second section is "T" shaped and measures 5 feet by 2 feet. All of my track and special work is hand laid and consists of Code 125 nickel silver running rail with the head of Code 100 rail soldered to its web to simulate girder rail. Much of the track runs in plaster paved streets and some has paving blocks carved into it. My overhead is completely hand-soldered (with no commercial hanger castings) from nickel silver wire and operates very reliably (I find overhead is easier to build than track!). I use a simple homemade transistor throttle to power my cars.
The other end of my layout has a turning wye patterned after the one at 81st and Halsted Streets. For this wye operation to be successful, the trolley wire must be tight and aligned properly because I have to back-pole through one of the wire frogs, and I don't have a motorman riding the model to hold the trolley rope to guide the pole like on the real cars!
Crews often had to repair the tracks as depicted in this scene. Paving blocks were removed and stacked up neatly on each side of the tracks. Small red flags were put on the street to warn motorists. Here, a Blue Goose PCC and an Old Pullman slowly pass each other though the work zone.
The Chicago & Joliet Electric Railway built an interesting steeple cab snow sweeper out of an old single truck passenger car. This sweeper is depicted by the model shown on the left. I built the model from scratch using styrene and brass from measurements I made of the actual car which is preserved at the Rockhill Trolley Museum in Orbisonia, Pennsylvania. The musuem's sweeper is the last surviving car from the C&JE Ry which ran along Archer Road between Joliet and Chicago's city limits.
This page was designed by, and is maintained by Phil O'Keefe
If you have any questions about my layout or my models, please feel free to contact me at:
Did you ever hear about Chicago's 60-mile common carrier two foot gauge electric railroad? The Chicago Tunnel Company operated 149 locomotives and over 3000 freight cars through a maze of underground passageways 40 feet below the streets of downtown Chicago from 1906 until 1959. To find out more about this obscure railroad, click on the picture above or the button below:
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If you like the models shown in this site, then click on the picture to the left to visit my other scale model website. |
