Wyo company's handiwork on display at Smithsonian
Wasatch Railcar Repair restored this passanger train car for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum is scheduled to open in Fall 2016 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
A Wyoming manufacturer’s handiwork will be on display
when a new museum opens next year in the nation’s capital.
The exhibit, a green train, rests in the bowels of the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture being
built along the National Mall. The Smithsonian charged Cheyenne-based Wasatch Railcar Repair Contractors with the
restoration of the passenger coach.
The century old passenger train is so large, stretching
80 feet and weighing 77 tons, it had to
be placed before the building’s construction. Crews built the rest
of the museum around the artifact.
Pullman Palace Car Company built the 44-seat Southern
Railway car in 1918. It was refurbished in the 1940s to create segregated
sections – whites in front with spacious seating and a lounge, blacks in back
where they had to stow luggage on laps or beneath seats.
The train ran from Kentucky to Tennessee down into
Florida from the 1940s to the 1960s. The railcar later sat in storage in
Tennessee before a railway executive donated it to the Smithsonian in 2009.
Visitors to the museum can read interpretive signs, walk
around and inside the train or follow guides and video displays to learn about
the segregated South and the Great Migration of blacks to cities in the north.
“This is the most prestigious job we have ever done,”
John Rimmasch, owner of Wasatch Railroad, told the
Wyoming Tribune Eagle at the time. “It could potentially be seen by
billions of people.”
A team of 20 people ranging from electricians and
carpenters to welders and painters spent 18 months in Kentucky restoring the
railcar.
Various railways and the National Park Service paid
$700,000 for the work.
Restoration finished in November 2013. The passenger coach was shrink-wrapped, loaded onto a convoy of semi-trucks and delivered to Washington, D.C. A pair of cranes lowered the coach from Constitution Avenue into the construction pit.
The museum is scheduled to open in 2016.
Wasatch Railroad Contractors is part of Wasatch Railcar Repair Contractors. The company recently expanded its operations to Shoshoni, a small town in central Wyoming. Wasatch Railcar offers the only general repair and restoration services for 500 miles. Rimmasch anticipates employing 50 to 75 people in Shoshoni.
Wasatch Railcar intends to purchase the two Shoshoni warehouses in which it operates. One of those buildings was built with the help of the Wyoming Business Council, the state’s economic development arm. The agency contributed $1.5 million to the facility’s construction in 2005.
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