On our California trip we briefly stopped at a number of small local museums of various types. Here's a sample of ones we saw on the return trip.
Folsom, Cal. has a local railroad museum of the typical sort: an old depot, a passenger car, and a caboose. As well as a pioneer village that wasn't open.
And they also have the old gallows turntable still in place.
The Saltair pavilion at Salt Lake City is still in use, although it no longer has interurban service.
It's an impressive building. You just have to imagine the SL&U trains pulling up in front.
The railroad museum in Ellis, Kansas has a depot, a caboose, and this park train, modeled after the Train of Tomorrow.
But Ellis is also the boyhood home of Walter P. Chrysler, so we went to see that. Just so I could tell my friend Bill Stewart I had been there. Walter Chrysler's father worked for the railroad, and so did Walter himself as a young man. The museum itself was quite interesting.
I asked how they came up with the unusual "Chrysler" for the normal German spelling "Kreisler", but this seems to be lost in the mists of history. The spelling was changed well before WWI.
Too bad they didn't have any Chrysler Building kits for sale.
You may have heard of Atchison, Kansas somewhere or other. Its railroad museum has a good-sized static collection, including this nice 2-8-0. They do have an operating park train of some sort. It was early in the morning, so no one was around, but there's nothing to keep you from touring the collection, apart from a sign forbidding vandalism. OK, I promise!
There are several Burlington cars in the collection:
The Budd coach Silver Gleam, and an RPO, the Silver Pouch.
Flags were at half-mast due to the Las Vegas massacre:
The original stone depot building serves as the city's history museum.
Finally, in Laclede, Missouri we visited the boyhood home and museum of General John J. Pershing, the man who won WWI and founded the Pershing Rifles. It seems like only yesterday I had to be able to recite, on command, all the facts of General Pershing's life. The town of Laclede itself seemed to be stuck in the 1930's.
But wherever you may travel, there's no place like home.
