WA tourist RR to open museum

[CHamilton]

MRSR To Open Museum in 2013

The Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad began running its steam powered excursion trains over 30 years ago and in that time has traversed the same seven miles between Elbe and Mineral Lake, where each train made a brief stop over at our lake side picnic ground. The location is scenic, but its proximity to the water made it impossible for MRSR to make any improvements that would enhance the passenger’s visit. The railroad has lacked a real destination that offers our patrons more than just the train ride. Beginning in June 2013, that will no longer be the case as MRSR opens Phase I of its new museum that focuses on the logging and lumbering industry of the great Pacific Northwest.

 

[CHamilton]

Mount Rainier train now goes to museum

A small group in the foothills of Mount Rainier has been tasked since the 1980s with running a tourist railroad there. It also has a larger goal of preserving some part of the logging era that helped found Washington state.
Now the engineers and history buffs have put their work and artifacts from the state’s industrial era on display as the beginnings of a museum they hope will attract visitors to their rail tracks.

“This is living history,” Stathi Pappas, the operation’s chief mechanical officer, said as an 1892 lathe behind him reshaped the wheel of one of the museum’s locomotives. “That’s what we’re here for, to show people what this past age was.”

The Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad now runs from its station in Elbe to the new museum in Mineral, where the group stores and revamps the locomotives.

The museum had its grand opening earlier this month. Before the railroad took passengers there, it went to a picnic area at Mineral Lake.