The folks at the Nevada State Railroad Museum (Carson City) have done a really nice job in their Display Building. The pictures in this album my give you some ideas.

http://railfan44.rrpicturearchives.net/ ... x?id=73564

Marty -

The wife and I visited earlier in October and were greatly impressed with the place! Really well done. Wish we had been there to see the McKeen car run.

Les

Marty,

I very much agree. NSRM is one of a handful of American railroad museums that have purpose-built museum buildings that allow full-size railroad equipment to be displayed in a well-designed museum setting. This is not a dim car barn with tightly-spaced parallel tracks, but is instead truly a museum that happens to feature railway equipment.

I had a chance to inspect the new displays a month ago…

The displays themselves are very good. They do a lot to make the building a museum instead of a long linear space full of trains. The panels and stories they tell are well thought out.

I have a couple of issues…

The new displays make the building static… the railroad equipment in the building is now trapped… Previously, the equipment in the building could and occasionally was removed and operated. The narrow gauge Porter 0-4-2 is now on a concrete plith… likely forever. Kimball coach No 4 is trapped by the track laying car display. Yes, No 4 could be moved sideways to the next track and removed from the building, but considering the effort involved that is unlikely. Inyo is now separated from its tender a viewing platform between the two… the viewing platform is removable, again, the effort to do that will limit Inyo’s outside appearances.

The flow in the building is a bit weird… You now can’t walk the length of the building between the tracks… only outside the two tracks.

The displays include a model railroad. (they have had a HO model railroad for years, in a corner) The model railroad now takes up one car’s worth of track space in its own enclosure . The new model railroad is better at telling Nevada railroad history. While models can be used to explain railroad history I am not sure I am comfortable with this display… In a museum rich in real artifacts, we see one less in favor of an HO model.

The museum is dealing with the all too common problem of how to display railroad equipment… While I have concerns, at least they are displaying and interpreting their collection.

Sorry to hear that the build-out has impacted the ability to rotate full-size collection items.

Time to figure out how to expand the building and then raise the money. I understand the building had to be reduced in size when originally built to match the available money. Another always present problem with any preservation.

Randy and Brian

I'm sure they had to make some difficult decisions when they redid the building. I think they did good! The rolling stock in the building really can stay there. The storage building out back is stuffed with interesting rolling stock that needs to see the light of day. So they have plenty to show outside. My only complaint was that the gift shop was out of men's XL McKeen Car T-shirts. 3XL is far to big. Dang!