(rshsdepot) Sacremento, CA: Chugging along: Old Sac railroad museum marks silver anniversary

["James Dent" <james.dent_@_itochu.com>]

-From the Sacramento Bee...

Chugging along: Old Sac railroad museum marks silver anniversary
By Bill Lindelof
Bee Staff Writer
(Published May 9, 2001)

In the museum world, 25 years is a bit on the young side. New York's Museum
of Modern Art opened in 1929.
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., was
officially dedicated in 1939.

The Charleston Museum in South Carolina, founded in 1773, is the oldest
museum in the United States.

But a quarter century for something that almost wasn't built is worth
honoring. So from Thursday through Saturday, the California State Railroad
Museum will celebrate its silver anniversary with a trainload of events.

Each day, at the museum and along the Old Sacramento waterfront, steam train
rides, lectures, handcar rides, "guest" locomotives and children's
activities will mark the occasion.

Admission to the museum is free during the celebration. One highlight will
be a new exhibit called "Cathedrals of Labor: The Industrial Legacy of the
Southern Pacific Railroad Sacramento Shops."

The shop area, where much of Sacramento once labored, is mostly cleared of
buildings where locomotives and cars were built and repaired for decades.

Remaining are a handful of cavernous old shops. Tours of the huge,
light-filled brick and concrete buildings will be given for $20.

The tours will allow people to see where their grandmothers or grandfathers
once worked. It will also provide a look at an area that will someday become
part of the city street grid as redevelopment transforms the old railyard in
downtown's northwest corner.

"The shops established Sacramento as a railroad town and was the largest
single-site industrial complex for years," in the western United States,
said state archivist Walter Gray, director of the museum from 1990-98. He
joined the museum staff in 1977.

The whistle that blew for shift changes could be heard throughout
Sacramento, until the shops closed several years ago.

"The tours are the city's first chance in decades to get a peek into those
buildings," Gray said.

The most impressive aspect of the tours is the erecting shop, where
locomotives were assembled in a long building "bigger than any cathedral.

"We have all seen these buildings from the freeway, but to go into that
space and see the light shafts slanting down is worth the price of
admission," Gray said.

The structure has 32 tall, wide doors on the west side where locomotives
were pushed inside for work, then outside onto a transfer table. More than
300 steam locomotives were built on the site between the 1870s and 1920s.

The $20 fee is charged to raise funds and, in part, to limit access to the
land owned by Union Pacific, Gray said.

The anniversary is traced to the first phase of the museum complex, the
reconstruction of the 1867 Central Pacific Railroad passenger station on
Front Street.

That project, which opened July 4, 1976, was successful after it made its
debut 25 years ago.

"It confirmed for us that the notion of building a large, formal,
substantial museum was an idea on the right track," Gray said.

But there were economic problems during that time: the Arab oil embargo,
high interest rates, lagging business productivity and inflated building
material prices, Gray said.

In early 1978, with work about to begin, officials worried about a brewing
taxpayers revolt.

"There was concern that if the museum did not take active steps to get under
construction, that if Prop. 13 actually passed, then the railroad museum as
well as other park projects would be stopped," Gray said.

The decision was made to "take the site work and piling contract" out of the
general contract and bid it early.

Moving that work ahead allowed the driving concrete pilings to support the
building. The construction had begun when Proposition 13 passed.

"A lot of good museum projects were stopped in state parks," Gray said. "The
railroad museum was the only one of those to move forward, primarily because
of the good judgment on the part of staff to insulate this thing from being
strangled in the cradle."

The Museum of Railroad History, the large building most tourists associate
with the museum, opened in May 1981 at a cost of $16.1 million. It draws
500,000 people a year.

Gray laments that there are not more interactive exhibits, the type that
were unheard of when the museum was established.

"One of the downsides of the economic difficulties that California
government experienced in the 1990s was that there wasn't necessary
reinvestment," Gray said. "Some of the exhibits are now 20 years old."

For information on anniversary activities, call the 24-hour hotline at (916)
445-6645 or visit the museum's Web site at
californiastaterailroadmuseum.org.

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