Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

http://www.midcontinent.org

This museum operates excursions over a 4-mile branch line south from the former Chicago & Northwestern Madison-Twin Cities line (now operated by WSOR as far as Reedsburg) at North Freedom to La Rue, a now mostly-abandoned quartzite and iron ore mining town.

Map:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=43.4 ... 53809&z=13

They have had a string of problems lately. First, from 1998-2000 their three restored steam locomotives were found to need major boiler and firebox repairs, and they have yet to scrape together the funds to return even one to service.

Since then they have been powering the excursions with classic diesel locomotives such as an ALCo S1 and a Baldwin RS-4-TC. Then in June 2008, a major flood on the Baraboo River inundated the museum, damaging the depot and passenger cars, and destroying the traction motors on the locomotives.

They just recently returned the S1 to service, and had their first public excursions since the flood this weekend. I don't have my video up yet, but someone else does:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfg0FY27Uuw

The line has four public crossings, three of which are signalized. All those crossings have identical 12" x 24" WCH incandescent signals with WCH mechanical bells. The one in North Freedom proper, in the museum itself, is on the site:

http://www.rxrsignals.net/Wisconsin/L-P ... m/Diamond/

The two others have a gate light on top of the bell-less signal. This is County Highway PF at La Rue, the last crossing before the end of the line:





Their crossings have AAR/DOT numbers and relay case labels now, both of which they lacked for a long time (the earliest record of them in the FRA database is 1987, with signals not added until the late 1990s). Although, "Mid-Continental" is slightly incorrect:

Well, at least they have mechanical bells, so they can't be all that bad...

This is what the flooding looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-0ioUmBxHU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzs0YDPzhNw

Guess it's a bad time to ask them to add another bell and fix their lights...

All in seriousness, seeing the water level rising so fast in the first video is just weird... And seeing the museum in 8 to 9 feet of water is somewhat depressing.

Yeah, it was pretty depressing. They lost almost a year's worth of revenue, and it set their already slow and cash-strapped steam program way back because they had to pay to fix their old diesels and the coaches that they use to give excursions, all of which had water damage to the wheels, undercarriage and floor. There was also 18" of water in the depot which had to have the floor replaced.

Anyhoo, got my video done:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SJzRgqSjGA

I neglected to mention earlier, Phil's Corner also has some good shots of the museum:

http://phil.rxrsignals.net/northfreedom.htm