Michael Janke

The summer went fast, as it always does. Working in the locomotive shop at the railroad museum made it go way faster.

The Minnesota Transportation Museum runs a tourist train on Saturdays and Sundays (the Osceola & St. Croix Valley Railway) and owns the Jackson Street Roundhouse in St. Paul Minnesota, where they maintain static displays, offer short rides in a caboose, and maintain & restore locomotives and rail cars.

A handful of volunteers like myself maintain the diesel locomotives and various auxiliary vehicles. We also spend a bunch of time doing in-yard shuffling of rail cars, moving locomotives and rail cars in & out of the roundhouse, and other odd jobs. I’ve helped perform Federally mandated 92-day inspections on locomotives, repaired locomotive brake cylinders and brake gear, fabricated brake running gear parts, troubleshot electrical issues, and worked on various track maintenance vehicles.

There is enough deferred maintenance on the museum’s seven operational diesel locomotives, their dozens of rail cars, and their 110 year old roundhouse to keep an army of volunteers busy, so what started out as a couple days a week ends up being quite a bit more.

The museum also has three steam locomotives, none of which are operational. One was operational up until about 20 years ago, one is completely disassembled, and one is assembled but not operational. None are likely to ever be operational again.

I also help out at the Osceola Railway – repairing the air conditioning motors and DC generators on the rail cars, helping perform routine maintenance on the locomotives, and occasionally riding along while they shuffle cars and locomotives around.

It’s interesting. Crawling under and climbing on locomotives is a complete break from my decades-long career in IT. It’s physically demanding, and an opportunity to learn totally new stuff while leveraging my decades-old machinist and mechanical skills.

And — I get to wear a hard-hat and orange vest. 🙂