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MELVIN PHOTOS
392 Sturtevant Hill Rd, Readfield, ME 04355 207-685-3901
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Tehachapi Today!
A full color 112 page hard bound book with dust cover showcasing the drama and beauty of railroading today at one of the seven wonders of the railroad world, Tehachapi Pass. Includes approximately 180 photographs.
The museum’s miniature train passes the new Orthwein Education and Visitor Center. The new exhibit hall will be located to the right of the Orthwein center.
Save 25% - Sale price $37.45 + $4.00 shipping MAINE RESIDENTS ADD 5% SALES TAX
112 page hard bound with dust cover on the Boston & Maine Black & White and color
photographs spanning 3 decades!
$49.95 plus $4.00
shipping EXCITING NEW DVD VIDEO RELEASE!
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Exciting train action from scenic prairies and great plai ns of North Dakota.
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troduced in 1921, as part of a publicity cam- paign the car was recovered, refurbished, and exhibited as a contrast to the new equip- ment. Subsequently, the car was stored and nearly forgotten. Today, the Bellefontaine car occupies a place of honor inside the en- trance of the new building. In 1946 the fledgling museum, by then in- corporated as a non-profit organization, ob- tained its first parcel of land. The site com- prised approximately four acres which included the West Barretts Tunnel formerly used by the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The tunnel and the adjacent area had historic value as the route of the Pacific Railroad of Missouri, the pioneer rail line west of the Mississippi River which was later renamed the Missouri Pacific. Two tunnels were built through ridges there between 1851 and 1853; the west tunnel originally was 450 feet long but was shortened to 410 feet in 1929. The route between them was just a high embankment from Barretts Station Road to the west tunnel. The two single- track tunnels on the primarily double track railroad from St. Louis to Jefferson City be- came a real bottleneck during World War II and in 1944 the line was relocated to new double track cuts through the ridges and the land between the tunnels eventually became the museum’s site. One challenge is that the museum is very much a built environment, including the ground the tracks are on. Everything on the upper two levels is on landfill, where construction of buildings is more expensive than usual. With the support of local railroads which
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made surplus material available, a switch was soon installed into the museum site, track extended from it, and the first exhibits were obtained and delivered. In April 1947, the first steam locomotive, Chicago & North Western class D 4-4-2 No. 1015, was ac- quired, and it was soon followed by four oth- ers. Before 1950, these were joined by two of- fice cars, two cabooses, eight streetcars from St. Louis and one from Kansas City, a horse- drawn streetcar and wagon, and four buses. A race to lay track for exhibits before they ar- rived had begun and continued for years. All this work was done by volunteers, headed up by Dr. John Payne Roberts (1920-1996), a physician at the Missouri Pacific Hospital in St. Louis. Being employed in the industry was an ad- vantage that Dr. Roberts used to full advan-
tage. When groups like the railroad superin- tendents or master mechanics met at St. Louis, he made certain he was there to es- tablish relationships and solicit donations. In 1948 the museum assumed the name “The Museum of Transport” and had grown to 20 acres. It later became the “National Museum of Transport” to reflect the fact that the col- lection was national in scope, not regional, and in the 1990s it became the current “Mu- seum of Transportation.” The museum’s foundation came at an ide-
al time. During the postwar dieselization of the railroads steam locomotives were being retired and were available for preservation as they never would be again. At the time, there was basically only one other place in the country collecting railroad equipment, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., dedicated in 1929 as the Edison In- stitute and opened to the public in 1933. The 1950s brought the museum one elec-
tric, one diesel, and 16 steam locomotives, four streetcars and three interurban cars, four passenger cars, and 12 freight cars. Two significant donations stand out.
Three 1870s steam locomotives and a 1904 interurban arrived from Purdue University on October 23, 1951. They were collected by the school starting in 1903 to enable stu- dents to examine actual examples of past de- signs instead of just drawings or photos. An- other key acquisition was the Katy Flyer, a 4-4-0 and five-car train that the railroad had used for publicity for several years. It arrived in St. Louis on the M-K-T under its own pow- er, the only locomotive in the collection to do so, and was brought to the museum on Sep- tember 26, 1952. In December 1954, the museum’s track
totaled half a mile. This included a wye out- side the entrance to the west tunnel for the storage of streetcars and interurbans. Track was restored through the length of the tun- nel and an Illinois Terminal railbus was used to provide rides through it starting in November 1954. An 0-4-0T was steamed up from time to time to provide caboose rides. By May 1955, the tunnel was needed to house the streetcars and by 1959 the muse- um had grown to approximately 65 acres. Dr. and Mrs. Roberts lived on the grounds for several years in an office car to keep watch until they moved to a house directly across the road. During the 1960s, the collection contin-
RON GOLDFEDER
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