As we get ready for 2025, it certainly has been an exciting year. It’s hard to believe so much happened in just a short time.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in and list out all the big things that happened this year:
Route 31 construction
Of course the most memorable thing for all of us this year was the construction on Route 31 just north of us. For most of the operating season, our museum was inaccessible from the north due to the rebuilding of a culvert under Route 31. However, visitors were not deterred and we still saw many smiling faces on our trains, braving all the detours.
Car barn extension
In order to support the efforts of our car department in their award winning restorations, we started a project to expand the barn to fit three more cars. Work is ongoing, but we have made major progress, and we can’t wait to unveil our new and improved barn next year.
CA&E 316 restoration
We aren’t quite done yet, but we have made a lot of progress on restoring CA&E car 316. The car department has been working tirelessly to give a companion to car CA&E 458, which was restored in 2022. It won’t be long before we can have two generations of cars from the Great Third Rail.
Updated car roster and QR codes
Thanks to the work of Kathleen Jamieson, Joe Hazinski, and Jacob Goldberg, we were able to get up to date descriptions on the website for every single car in our collection so everyone can learn about our cars and their fascinating histories. Each car has its own story to tell, and thanks to the work of our dedicated team we can ensure that story is preserved and accessible to all.
To make it even easier to learn about our cars, we mounted QR codes pointing to the info pages for each car, enabling our visitors to info about every car right from their phones.
New website and mailing list
At the start of our season, we migrated our website from WildApricot onto WordPress to help us modernize our web presence. We also set up a mailing list so everyone can be kept up to date about everything we have going on and never miss a chance to attend one of our special events.
More changes are coming in 2025, so stay tuned!
New board and officers
After 40 years, our president Ed Konecki and vice president Fred Lonnes decided not to seek re-election and helped bring the next generation of museum leadership on board. We now welcome in Ben Rohling as our president, backed by a board consisting of himself, Doug Rundell, Patrick Storm, James Tarbet, and Chris Nelson.
Restoration of baggage cart and tunnel ash cars
Thanks to the restoration efforts of Ron Ruhl and his family, we have added a former Chicago Tunnel Company ash car and two baggage carts as static displays, adding a bit more variety to our collection and showcasing a lesser-known piece of Chicago railroad history to the public.
Trivia Trolley and Night Trolley
We expanded our special event offerings this year with the Trivia Trolley and Night Trolley, with both events being very well received. We are always looking for ideas for new special events, so please let us know if you have any!
All-new Friday runs of the Polar Express
After the popularity of the Polar Express Premier last year, we brought it back this year and expanded it by offering Friday runs to allow even more families to experience Christmas cheer in a vintage trolley.
Record-setting ticket sales for the Ghost Story Train
We absolutely smashed the post-2020 record for Ghost Story Train ticket sales, selling over 80% of the tickets, with our previous record being about 65%. We look forward to continuing this success next year with all of the events we have planned.