Hello Jim
Do you have any photos of period Pomona fluted cars in living color ?
Speaking of Pomona..has any one ever seen one of their Zephyrs ?
Bernard Stuempel..... did he build cars for the rebuilt Museum of Science and Industry layout ?
EPA is doing it's best to close every foundry out there ... little mom and pop foundries willing to one offs are far and few these days .
Nice PA ... ...you only cast one of those beauties ?
Here is the article covering the MSI 1989 rebuild mentioning Bernard Stuempel ... assuming the same person ...both located in the same area ..interesting comment thrown out about Trump .... from 91 !
Tribute paid to train tradition
• MARK KIESLING dec 22, 1991 If, as Glenwood hobby shop owner Don McWhorter claims, "trains are
Christmas," the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has the stuffing beaten out of Santa Claus.
Unless, of course, you are Donald Trump in his pre-Kmart incarnation and can afford to put a 3,000-square-foot layout under the tree. It's the rare tyke who does not have visions of Santa Fe dancing in his head on those nights before Christmas, but if a train set's not in the cards this year - heck, even if it is - pack the family into the car and head on up to 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive for a look at the Museum & Santa Fe Railroad, one of the institution's main attractions. The layout, a permanent fixture at the museum since 1941, is enough to inspire any budding train buff. Be warned: Once the kids see it, they're going to want to try their hand at home locomotion. That anyone is able to enjoy the massive project at all is due in large part to McWhorter, owner of Don's Hobby World in Glenwood Plaza, and the group he assembled from the South Suburbs and Northwest Indiana who undertook to renovate the railway. The general contractor for the renovation was Circuitron Corporation in Riverside, Ill., which had recently installed a General Motors display at the museum. When Circuitron president Steve Worack ran into some problems with a partner, he turned to McWhorter for assistance. "I knew from years of experience what each of these guys could do and what his specialty was," McWhorter said. "So I said, let's do it. Let's run with it." "We thought maybe this would take us five, six months," said Dave Rudnickas of Highland, a Hobby World employee. "We had no idea it would end up taking more than a year and a half." For three or four nights a week, a crew recruited by McWhorter redid - mostly from scratch - what Minton Cronkhite originally did in 1941 and Robert Smith redid 12 years later. "The only thing left from the original is the track plan itself, and some of the mountains," Rudnickas said. "We took up all the buildings, the roads, the trees. It was like a wasteland." The bill for the restoration was being footed by the Santa Fe railroad, which wanted the look of the layout to be brought into the present from the early 1950s. "Santa Fe wanted to bring it up to date, how the Santa Fe is viewed today," McWhorter said. Because Santa Fe was footing the bill, what they wanted carried a lot of weight. Old rural roads which crisscrossed the 1941 layout were replaced by modern roads. The Interstate highway system, which began construction for real in 1956, is now represented in miniature, engineered by Rich Urbanski of South Holland and built by Urbanski and Tim Engle, also of South Holland. Under the overpasses on the Interstate, the crew painted its own initials as graffiti, a kind of signature on the nearly $150,000 project. A lot of research went into the renovation: McWhorter went to Barstow and Bakersfield, Calif., to look over and photograph rail yards and stations there, and traveled to LaSalle, Ill., to review a cement plant that would serve as a model for the museum layout. After Bernard Stuempel of Matteson hand made each of the O-scale cars with a vacuum former, they were assembled and painted by Rudnickas, Pat Mehegan of Lansing and Brian Strom of Homewood. The Smith renovation of 1953 had held up well - there was less than 20 percent wear on the tracks, which were reused after a little regauging and tightening of some spikes.
The wiring was a different story. The 10,000-plus feet of cloth-covered wire had to be replaced, which meant a crew of three had to spend nearly three months in the cavern underneath the layout with less than 30 inches of headroom. It was not a job for the claustrophobic, but Circuitron president Steve Worack and several helpers recruited by McWhorter, including two Jim Nilles - junior and senior - and Phil Serviss. The renovation was completed and opened to the public in April 1989.
So if the layout was all rebuilt in 1953 by Smith and again rebuilt in 1989 .....then auctioned off the layout piece by piece .... did they sell off the 1989 items ? the Smith era items ? and or the 1941 Minton items? ... Where did those beautiful glistening F units and matching polished passenger cars go? I lusted after the set as a kid with my face pushed up against the glass in the 60's /70's ?
Cheers Carey
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