The Colfax Railroad Museum is a

railroad museum A railway museum is a museum that explores the history of all aspects of rail related transportation, including: locomotives (steam, diesel, and electric), railway cars, trams, and railway signalling equipment. They may also operate historic equ ...

in Colfax,

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

Collection

The

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

houses a collection of equipment from railroads that served western

and eastern

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

. The collection includes Soo Line

caboose A caboose is a crewed North American railroad car coupled at the end of a freight train. Cabooses provide shelter for crew at the end of a train, who were formerly required in switching and shunting, keeping a lookout for load shifting, damag ...

number 273,

Barney and Smith Car Company Barney and Smith Car Company was a railroad car manufacturer in Dayton, Ohio. {{coord, 39.767096, -84.175273, display=title Founded in 1849 by Eliam Eliakim Barney and Ebenezer Thresher as Thresher, Packard & Company, it changed names as partne ...

heavyweight coach number 991, and Soo Line

GP30 The EMD GP30 is a four-axle diesel-electric locomotive built by General Motors Electro-Motive Division of La Grange, Illinois between July 1961 and November 1963. A total of 948 units were built for railroads in the United States and Canada ( ...

number 703, and other cars. The depot houses the large collection of

railroad lantern A lantern is an often portable source of lighting, typically featuring a protective enclosure for the light sourcehistorically usually a candle or a wick in oil, and often a battery-powered light in modern timesto make it easier to carry and h ...

s, railroad

china China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, and the nation's largest railroad

paperweight A paperweight is a small solid object heavy enough, when placed on top of papers, to keep them from blowing away in a breeze or from moving under the strokes of a painting brush (as with Chinese calligraphy). While any object, such as a stone, ...

collection. Exhibits in the museum illustrate the items of

material culture Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects creat ...

that people encountered in their day-to-day activities with the railroads and how technology changed over time.

Steam locomotives

Diesel locomotives

Passenger cars

Freight cars

*Soo Line, Boxcar #36400

Cabooses

*Milwaukee Road #X00127 *Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern #018 *Soo Line #256 *Soo Line #273

MoW equipment

Canadian National Speeder #154-33

History

The museum is housed in the third

depot Depot ( or ) may refer to: Places * Depot, Poland, a village * Depot Island, Kemp Land, Antarctica * Depot Island, Victoria Land, Antarctica * Depot Island Formation, Greenland Brands and enterprises * Maxwell Street Depot, a restaurant in ...

to be built in the village. Built from

sandstone Sandstone is a clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate grains. Sandstones comprise about 20–25% of all sedimentary rocks. Most sandstone is composed of quartz or feldspar (both silicates) ...

quarried nearby, this building was constructed between 1914 and 1915 on the foundation of the second depot, which had previously been moved off the site to serve as a personal residence. In 1958, a large storm tore through western Wisconsin, producing many

tornado A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with both the surface of the Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone, altho ...

es, one of which hit the freighthouse on the depot's west side. The wall of the women's waiting room was rebuilt from the rubble, but the freight house was never restored.

References

External links

* {{authority control Railroad museums in Wisconsin Museums in Dunn County, Wisconsin