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This Great Lakes History Log is presented by Filer Credit Union and the Mason County Historical Society
By Rob Alway, Editor-in-Chief
GREEN BAY, Wis. — One of the interesting things about traveling through Wisconsin is the opportunity to explore museums dedicated to the industries that shaped the Great Lakes region. On Saturday, Aug. 22, I visited the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, following a visit earlier in the day to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc.
Founded in 1956, the National Railroad Museum is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. It is the only congressionally designated railroad museum in the United States and has grown into one of the nation’s largest railroad museums. Its 33-acre campus along the Fox River contains more than 70 pieces of historic rolling stock and more than 100,000 smaller artifacts.
For someone interested in transportation history, the museum offers an impressive opportunity to see the scale of railroad equipment up close. Perhaps the most imposing piece in the collection is Union Pacific No. 4017, one of the railroad’s famous “Big Boy” steam locomotives. The massive articulated locomotive weighs about 1.1 million pounds and is nearly half the length of a football field. Twenty-five Big Boys were built between 1941 and 1944 to move heavy freight through the mountains of Utah and Wyoming. No. 4017 is one of eight preserved examples.
Another highlight is the British-built steam locomotive Dwight D. Eisenhower and two cars associated with Eisenhower’s World War II command trains. The locomotive is the only A4 Class engine in the United States. Two London and North Eastern Railway cars accompanying it were converted for Eisenhower’s wartime use, including one that served as his personal quarters and meeting space. The locomotive arrived at the museum in 1964, and Eisenhower himself visited later that year.
The collection extends well beyond steam locomotives. Among the other notable pieces are the General Motors Aerotrain, Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 electric locomotive, historic passenger and dining cars and equipment representing different periods and functions of American railroading. The museum also interprets subjects such as Pullman porters, railroad labor and the role trains played in American society.
The size of the equipment is one of the advantages of experiencing railroad history in person. Photographs can document a locomotive, but standing alongside a Big Boy — or walking through passenger equipment built for another era — provides a much better understanding of the engineering and human scale involved in operating the nation’s railroad system.
The museum also operates train rides around its property from May through September and on weekends in October. The approximately 25-minute trip covers two miles along a one-mile loop that passes through wooded portions of the grounds and along the Fox River.
The National Railroad Museum is particularly strong because much of its collection can be explored at close range. Visitors can walk alongside locomotives, climb aboard selected equipment and see passenger cars much as railroad travelers and crews would have experienced them. Rather than simply displaying railroad artifacts behind glass, the museum puts visitors among the equipment and gives them a better sense of how railroads once operated.
For anyone interested in industrial, transportation or American history, the National Railroad Museum is worth setting aside several hours to explore. Its collection covers everything from the steam era and passenger travel to wartime transportation and some of the more unusual experiments in American railroad design.
For more information on the National Railroad Museum, visit www.nationalrrmuseum.org.
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