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In 1922, The Illinois Traction System (ITS, later the Illinois Terminal System) sent a special train to the Central Electric Railroad Association’s (CERA) national convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. Port City Car Company (PCCC) brings that special train to the Microsoft Train Simulator.

The train consisted of a re-furbished Class B locomotive #1578, coach #531, the sleeper “Edwardsville”, and the #513 parlor observation “Clinton”. The train made the journey under its own power, except for a gap in the electric railways between Danville, IL and Crawfordsville, IN, where it was hauled by the steam power of the Peoria & Eastern (NYC). Upon arrival in Indianapolis, it was put on public display, and an average of 600 people per hour toured the train

Our modeling of the ITS 1922 CERA train "As realistic as it gets"

The Class B locomotive and the rest of the train, is modeled for MSTS in the 1922 paint scheme, with the appropriate appliances of that era. Each model also has a passenger view, and in the case of the locomotive, pressing the #5 key will put the view in the rear cab, just right for switching or backup moves.

In addition to a passenger view, the Class B also comes with a choice of wire heights. To make this easier for all to install, the Class B comes with a self-installer. Of course, for those so inclined, you can direct the self-installer to place the files in a temporary folder, and pick which files you would like to include in the MSTS Trainset folder. The cars for the train install in the “traditional” manner (create a folder under Trainset, unzip the contents to that folder).

The Class B will appear in the MSTS Consist Editor, or ConBuilder, six times, provided a choice of three wire heights (MSTS default Tokyo route of 5.4 meters, Dave Mewhinney’s Mesaba route of 6.2 meters, and the MSTS default NEC route of 7.2 meters), and passenger view or No Passenger View (NPV) for each wire height choice.

Each of the cars comes with two choices, a passenger view, or NPV. We designed it this way because MSTS defaults to the first passenger view it finds in the consist. So for instance, if you decided to build a consist of the Indianapolis Train, you would select a Class B with NPV (and appropriate wire height), coach#531 NPV, the sleeper NPV, and the parlor observation with the passenger view. The cars do not have trolley poles, but they were electrically powered for lighting with bus jumpers (cables), pulling power from the locomotive’s pole.

The plan at PCCC is to bring you a variety of renditions of the locomotive and cars sometime in the future. Like almost all railroad rolling stock, these cars and locomotives were given a variety of paint schemes and appliances over the years. We will also issue an ITS caboose shortly, but it is lettered for the successor railroad Illinois Terminal.

Also uploaded with the four Trainset files (ITS1578.zip, ITS531.zip, ITSslpre.zip, ITS513.zip) is a Sound file named ITS_Who.zip. This is a player piano musical recording, used with the permission of Gabe Della Fabe. This file can be used to replace the Sound folder of the ITS513.zip (the parlor observation car) and will provide piano music for the observation deck. In addition, there are .sms files for the PCCC doodlebugs previously released, so this same file can be used to provide piano music for the doodlebug’s observation platform.

We at PCCC wish to thank the people of the Museum of Transport for allowing us access to the Class B (and the Class C) locomotive for detailed photographs to help us in the construction of this locomotive model. In addition, extensive background information was provided by Dale Jenkins, President of the Illinois Traction (Historical) Society.http://www.illinoistractionsociety.org/. And our thanks also to Gabe Della Fave for allowing us to use his player piano music.http://www.mindspring.com/~gabedellafave/player.htm