(The following article by Jeremiah McWilliams was posted on the Virginian-Pilot website on December 2.)
NORFOLK, Va. — Let’s say you’re Norfolk Southern Corp., celebrating your 175th anniversary this month. What to do?
Build a museum.
“I love it – what’s not to love?” said Frank Brown, Norfolk Southern’s assistant vice president of corporate communications, as he surveyed construction of the first-floor facility in the railroad’s downtown headquarters. “I hope we’re not flattering ourselves. We think this will be an educational opportunity. It was a great opportunity to collect some of these things.”
The company unveils its 1,600-square-foot museum today for an invitation-only audience and will open it to the public Monday.
Exhibits highlight some of the company’s history and artifacts: sections of Civil War-era track, vintage hand tools and diagrams to teach hand signals to railroad trainees. There’s a locomotive simulator, a ringing bell and a railroad car coupler that weighs more than 900 pounds.
The exhibits are free, but for this Fortune 500 company, which had a $301 million profit last quarter, there’s a business angle, too. Some exhibits may be tweaked to appeal to visiting clients such as lumber companies or automotive parts suppliers.
“We like to have a little marketing aspect to it,” said Rhonda Broom, manager of advertising and promotions for Norfolk Southern. “Hopefully it will have some multiple uses.”
Norfolk Southern is one of the latest companies seeking to put its history to use. Motorola opened an electronics museum in 1991 at its Schaumburg, Ill., headquarters. The Coca-Cola Co. has a museum in Atlanta, and railroad operator Union Pacific Corp. features one of the country’s oldest corporate collections in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
“In terms of corporate museums, I do think there’s more of a trend with companies doing more of these types of projects,” said Jason Dressel, senior client counsel with The History Factory, a Chantilly, Va., company that helped plan and construct the Norfolk Southern museum. “We’ve certainly seen quite a few of them in the last few years.”
Norfolk Southern drew on support from its employees, many of whom sent in photographs and other items for the museum.
“I can say we were a little overwhelmed by the amount of information out there,” Dressel said. “You’d have a museum the size of the state of Virginia if you really wanted to present everything.”
Research teams scoured Norfolk Southern sites in Atlanta, Norfolk and Roanoke to find material for the exhibits.
Christina Simms, who helped lead The History Factory’s historical research on the project, found a Roanoke warehouse stuffed with wooden patterns, or replicas, for locomotive parts. Other sleuthing unearthed a pristine trainman’s uniform, circa 1943, and a 250-pound pattern for a locomotive’s driver wheel that is as large as a kitchen table.
“It’s a treasure chest, really,” said Simms of Norfolk Southern’s historical collection.
The project took about a year to complete once Norfolk Southern brought The History Factory on board. Norfolk Southern spokeswoman Susan Terpay said the company would not disclose how much the project cost.
The museum will not be the only publicity for Norfolk Southern in the next few weeks. Chairman David R. Goode and Wick Moorman, president and chief executive officer, are scheduled to ring the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 12. Norfolk Southern employees plan to toss out engineer hats and park a replica of the “Best Friend of Charleston” – the first steam locomotive built in the United States for regular passenger travel – outside the exchange.
Visitors to the Norfolk museum can trace the evolution of the company from its earliest ancestor in 1830 to the present day. Like the company, which now operates about 21,300 route miles and ranks as the fourth-largest railroad in the United States, the nuts and bolts of the rail industry have beefed up – a lot.
A “link and pin” coupler dating from 1880, encased in glass at the museum, is about the size of a flattened professional football. A Norfolk Southern coupler now weighs more than 900 pounds and looks more like a burly tree stump. Locomotives that once resembled horse-drawn wagons now can pull mile-long trains loaded with coal.
But nostalgia and historical facts get you only so far, Brown said.
“History’s great – we love history,” he said. “But business today is all about ‘what have you done for me lately?’ The best part of our story is hopefully still ahead.”