An Afternoon at the Train Museum

N. at the museum in 2009

N. at the museum in 2011

Last week N. and I went to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, NC.  We went there two years ago and it was fun to see how much N. remembered from that visit.  The museum is on the old maintenance yards for the Southern Railway; there is a cool round house, repair shops, turntable, lots of engines, and a short train ride available.

As a museum, it is woefully underfunded and underdeveloped; there are missing explanatory signs and aging exhibits that are just beginning to be replaced.  It also does a poor job "interpreting" the era.  I was struck by the sea of white faces in all the old photos of the workers at the Spencer works and wondered what role African-Americans played in the rail history of that area.  But the museum is entirely mum on the issue of race relations.

Despite the fact that it was difficult to learn as much as we would have liked to about the development of railways in the South from this museum, N. enjoyed seeing lots of magnificent train engines, which was really the main attraction anyway!