Pix?

In reference to my earlier posting, back in the sixties my buddy and I were high school kids, and anything we could have found would have been "cool". Having aged just a bit since then, it has ceased to be important... there were a lot of Soo wood cabeese saved because they lasted in service so late, and I should think that everyone who wants one has got one. However, the same may not be the case with wood cars from the Lackawanna, which is why Les is interested in the three the DSS&A picked up from the DL&W, I'm sure. A cell phone snap would allow us to identify its general type, at least.

Has any other museums bought any of the equipment yet thats still hidden in the brush at the M&W Railroad Museum or is most of the equipment still there rusting away in the brush?

It is apparently not for sale. If you read the entire thread, Herb Sakalaucks of the Colfax Railroad Museum, Colfax, WI, has been in contact with Mr. Lind, and it sounds like rather recently.

download/file.php?id=3761

out of curiosity, what is that tender in the photo? looks almost like off of a NYC 0-8-0.

With the high coal bunker and railing around the top of the cistern, it has the look of the small engine tenders rebuilt during the WWII era by the Soo Line. Considering most the rest of Mr. Lind's collection came from the Soo, that would be my first guess.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=36027



colfaxstation wrote:
There is a Soo Line work train steam engine tender available.

Herb Sakalaucks
Colfax Railroad Museum

The Minnesota & Western is no more. The equipment was either sold or scrapped and the site has been completely cleared. Mr. Sakalaucks managed the sale of the equipment and quite a few museums got things that they needed. Unfortunately, scrap thieves also got quite a few valuable or scarce pieces that had been salvaged and were staged for shipping. None of the wooden cars survived except as bits and pieces. However their trucks did survive and several went to Mid-Continent Railway Museum for their restoration department.

Do you know what happened to the M&StL wood boxcar?

if he said that all wooden cars were not saved (scrapped, or just fell apart), so i presume it is gone, unless i am dumb.

The question is, does he mean all of the wood cars at the beginning of the liquidation, or everything that remained once some initial equipment was removed. In the thread I posted above we see this: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=36027

"The M&StL 2-8-0 is being purchased by a private party. The Coronet Phosphate 2-6-2T will be going to the Colfax Railroad museum, along with the Milw. Rd. URTX reefer, and, hopefully, the Iowa Central wood boxcar (if it's transportable). "

Iowa Central was an M&StL predecessor. It has never been confirmed what happened to the car, even though the person who arranged the donation to Mr. Lind back in the seventies, Ron Tavis, has asked here repeatedly.

When we started trying to recover parts from the wooden cars we had to bushwhack through a significant forest even to get to the cars. What we found was most disappointing. The cars were mostly collapsed and were far too unstable to enter. They were too unstable to attempt to recover any of the undercarriage structure. You simply did not dare to get under them. The plan had been to tip the cars over on their sides to salvage brake rigging, truss does, queen posts and other undercarriage parts. But the cars simply came apart when they were tipped rendering most parts unsalvageable. The more modern steel cars were at the other end of the property and had fared far better. They were all enclosed and in fair condition aside from heavy infestations of mice. There was one caboose that might have been saved, but it was pretty far gone. You had to be very careful not to fall through the floor. We saved what we could, but when the contractor came in during the winter to remove the steam locomotives, the wooden hulks were simply bulldozed out of the way. Nothing was saved but the trucks. A sad end to one man's dream.

The Iowa Central boxcar had a full steel frame made of riveted "pressed steel" construction and fish belly pressed steel side frames, and a steel roof. It was built with Fox trucks, so the whole car was sort of a pioneer promotion of revolutionary pressed steel construction. I bought the car about 1973 from Mr. McHugo who was working at Cedar Lake Yard. He wrote a bill of sale on a postcard size piece of paper and referred to the car being sold as a “Shed” so it did not have to go through layers of approval. It was being used as a storage shed at the time. I recall they stored grain doors in it and it sat down by the elevator near Kenwood. That is the elevator that burned down and they made apartments out of it. Mr. McHugo charged me a dollar for the car, and later I transferred it to Don to add to his museum.

At that time, the car was a fit as a fiddle with completely solid wood as interior and external walls separated by a frame made of about 3 x 3 stock as vertical posts and diagonal braces, interior wood walls were polished from grain, and also displayed several ancient stenciled instructions, exterior wood was painted M&StL green, the car had a patented steel roof, and was complete with all ladders, grab irons, and stirrups, had a novel pressed steel frame with fish belly side form, complete steel center sill, pressed steel car bolsters, pressed steel cross beams and end sills, draft gear pockets, exterior vertical angle irons at each end, and running board, all painted with no rust or deterioration whatsoever. So it was a steel car with double wood sheathing and siding.

I recall that the wood frame inside of the car walls, each end of the vertical wood members, and the two converging diagonal wood members joining together with the ends of the vertical members and two diagonal members meeting in a cast iron pocket joint connector bracket at top and bottom of the framing members.

It lacked handbrakes, air brakes, couplers, and trucks. It had been built for Ia.C. RR with Fox pressed steel trucks. I believe the car was built identical to the Ia.C. car that Mid Continent Railway Museum has. So the car was as solid as a tank when Don hauled it out to Annandale. Don left a rubber tired dual tandem set of wheels at the car in Minneapolis and also left one of his old trucks. I got one end of the boxcar on the wheels and the other end resting on a timber pedestal lashed to the truck bed.

Then we heated up 1” steel rods and tied the ends from the front corners of the truck bed, and ran the rods back to converge and connect to the coupler pocket. It was quite a rig to take out on the highway. I did not go along for the ride. The pedestal on the truck bed had a steel plate on top and that plate was all greased up so the truck could turn corners with that boxcar end sitting on the truck bed. Earlier in the process preparing for the move, I broke three toes as I was using the top edge of a shovel to pull and flip a 2 ft. square x 4 ft. long timber one face at a time on frozen ground. That was an unforgettable moment.

I never got out to Don’s museum much after he brought the boxcar out there. So I don’t know if it deteriorated over the years. I believe he did put trucks under it but they were from another car and not the original Iowa Central Fox trucks. Those were long gone since the car had been converted to use as a storage shed.

Don also had those wooden passenger cars, but they were in rough condition from the start and deteriorated to collapse over time at Annandale.

Iowa Central car went to Iron Horse Central in Chisago MN

Cool, I think this must be it, M&StL 4520 being moved around in 2017, they have it on trucks now, from their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Ironhorse-Rail ... 000149588/

Herb,

Thanks for that information. I am glad to hear that it went to a good home.

Apparently this photo shows an Ia.C. car of the same series:

https://www.midcontinent.org/equipment- ... ollection/