On Exhibit - The Golden Age of Rail

On a January day, museum volunteers have driven their cars inside Building One and closed the huge roll-up doors to keep out the wind which is cold enough to freeze the flame on a match before blowing it out.

Overflowing tool boxes perch on tailgates and hoods. The pin-point flame of a torch cuts through old shelving. Sparks rain down from a grinder smoothing away rough edges on one of 33 structural posts which extend three stories upward to the standing seam roof. When the grinder stops, you can hear the clank of a pipe wrench struggling with the fittings of old gas and oxygen lines which ultimately fall to the floor with a thud. This is a hardhat area.

Those conversations which are not drowned out by the sounds of the tools are swallowed up by the cavernous space of a 28,618 square foot building. The conversion of a utilitarian steel industrial building into an exhibition hall requires a slow, methodical approach. In his or her own way, each volunteer can to see far enough into the future to envision how this facility will bring the past alive.

They see the replacement of the damaged walls, the application of paint, the installation of two 288-foot display tracks down the center of the building, and the refurbishment of the existing two-story block house on the north side into public restrooms and a museum office.

On the south track, facing east, they see a diesel passenger locomotive, a 1949 silver-sided 10-6 sleeping car and a business car that first ran on the Canadian National Railways as a baggage/smoker in 1924.

On the north track, facing west, they see a light pacific steam locomotive, the premier-class sleeper lounge Washington Club, and the Pullman private car Superb. The car lights are on, the trapdoors are open, and the steps and step boxes are in place. Step inside into the Golden Age of rail.

Next to each car and locomotive, a draftsman's style display table contains narrative information, photographs, maps, and other artifacts which illustrate the equipment's significance and use. In a later phase, a platform and ramps conforming to ADA standards will be constructed between the tracks in the style of a station platform.

In the southeast and northwest corners of the room, the arrival and departure signs from Terminal Station will loom above the throng of visitors making their way between the exhibits lining the north and south walls of the exhibition hall. Here is a display of track tools, there is a traction motor, down there is a steam tractor, and on the far side--you'll have to move around the light pacific to see it next to the audio-visual room--is an on-loan exhibit featuring present day rail transportation technology. The benches which were once used in Atlanta's Terminal and Union stations have been placed in the building for use by tired visitors.

In a future phase, the 3500 square foot "tank room" on the south side of the building will be converted into a display area for smaller artifacts including exhibits that focus on Atlanta transit, track, railway equipment design, maps and timetables, the railway office, passenger service, and a timeline showing the development of railway companies in Georgia from the 1830s to the present day.

The Building One exhibits provide a central focus through which the past of a region built and shaped by railroads can be recalled, interpreted and demonstrated as an evolving series of events and decisions that continue to influence who we are, where we live, what we eat, when we get up and when we go to bed, and why the world around us is as it is.

As community leaders throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area wrestle with the tangled problems of freeway gridlock, air and water pollution, the quality of life, and the livelihoods of dispirit population groups, rail is much in the news these days as a potential solution. Will the city and its suburbs go back to the future? Probably, for as Atlanta Magazine said in 1965, "there has always been a fierce fidelity between Atlanta and the railroad, sometimes against the will of either or both, and if it has occasionally been a star-crossed marriage, it is also an indissoluble one."

It's dark by the time the volunteers finish the day's work, pack it in, and step outside. The temperature has dropped. The southbound Amtrak Crescent races down the Norfolk Southern mainline for Atlanta in a blur of light.