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RAILROAD MUSEUM’S NEW ADDITION ON TRACK

By Wes Clement/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, July 10, 2009 11:29 PM CDT

An interior addition to the Arkansas Railroad Museum has taken shape over the past couple of months as volunteers continue to work together to create more display space at the museum.

Bill McCaskill, a volunteer at the Arkansas Railroad Museum, works on one of the map storage cabinets on the second floor of the new addition at the museum Friday afternoon. Pine Bluff Commercial/Ralph Fitzgerald

“We should be ready to occupy it quickly,” volunteer Bill McCaskill said.

The structure was built by about six volunteers.

The inside of the two-story, 884-square-foot structure was painted one week by female community punishment workers and the women returned to the museum another week to clean old display cases.

Museum volunteers purchased wooden display cases from downtown Pine Bluff’s recently shut down band museum using a grant from Union Pacific Railroad.

One purpose of taking on the project, McCaskill said, was to have more space for accessing Cotton Belt archives. The museum’s archives include various items including “train sheets,” handwritten accounts of locomotive activity, blueprints, aerial photo negatives of each mile of Arkansas railways, train magazines and many other items.

The archive materials will be available to the public by appointment for research.

“Nobody’s hired,” McCaskill said recently. “We have about six or seven volunteers who have been working on it and it comes and goes as people are available.”

The project has been funded primarily by a portion of proceeds from the society’s annual fund-raising event, a large train show.

The construction project was originally planned to begin during 2006, but storm damage to the museum caused the project to be delayed.

A working-condition ALCO locomotive engine formerly operated by Little Rock and Western Railway, has recently been temporarily added to the museum’s collection, McCaskill said. Its owner, he said, plans to restore the engine before selling it.

The museum is located at 1700 Port Road.

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