Jill's Journal: Opened in 1976, California State Railroad Museum is considered to be the preeminent railroad museum in North America. It boasts 225,000 square feet of exhibits, including 21 restored locomotives and railroad cars.
This is another spot in Sacramento that Rob remembers coming to with his Dad when he was around our girls’ ages, so it was special to revisit it and to be able to share it with his own kids.
Highlights include a Pullman sleeping car and this dining car featuring a galley kitchen and displays of railroad china. It really gives one a sense of the days when train travel was treated as a first-class mode of transportation.
This was so interesting: the Last Spike, or Golden Spike, was the ceremonial final spike driven in the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869. Made of 14 ounces of 17.6-karat copper-alloyed gold, it is now on permanent display at Stanford University. The brainchild behind using a spike of gold was San Francisco financier David Hewes (who, along with Leland Stanford, drove the Last Spike at the railroad’s completion in Utah Territory). Unbeknownst to anyone except the jeweler who made it, Hewes had an identical second Golden Spike made at the time. Hewes and his descendents kept this “Lost Spike” for 136 years before finally making it public in 2005. The Lost Spike is now here at the Railroad Museum.
3 comments:
If you have any interest in Trains this is the place to go the Trains are actual restored engines and cars the real mcCoys. It brings railroad history to life. I love this museum for the fact that we can actually get on the cars and see the engines that were so important in the development of this country in real life and we for the moment can be a part of that history.
Andee
I seem to remember Mom and I having gone to the Railroad Museum with Bobby and Dad. It was always a fun and memorable family trip.
Wendi
The museum has changed a bit since the times I saw it last. There is still some of the old, but they have really expanded the story telling of the displays (quite nicely). It is a very, very well-done museum, but some of the special exhibits we saw when they opened will probably never be equaled, at least not in my memory. It was great to see that they are all still the real McCoy's in that they still place oilpans under the drips, and that many of the trains, even the ones I think they think will never move again, still drip.
On a side note, yes, Wendi, we were there as a family, and the girls knew that - but I'm working very hard to give the girls a sense of who their Grandfather was, and what he enjoyed. Jill was following along with that sense in this post (which after all is for their benefit as a journal for the journey). Seeing the things that I've seen over the last several days, and into the next couple of weeks will probably trigger a lot of memories for me. I'm looking forward to that, and will likely share a lot of stories in the next little while.
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