(The following story by David Steinkraus appeared on The Racine Journal Times website on May 29, 2010.)
STURTEVANT, Wisc. — As large and orange as it is, it is still easy to drive right by this piece of history sitting beside Wisconsin Street.
The caboose looks like all the other bits of railroad equipment that dot this end of the village near the spot where the old Amtrak depot once stood. But the big orange caboose is part of the Sturtevant Rails Railroad Museum, as are the three boxcars just to its east, the small track cars and the collection of signals.
Even the track on which the boxcars sit is special. It is not track laid by the museum volunteers at random but was once part of the original rail line that ran from Racine to Beloit and on to Savanna, Ill. on the Mississippi River, said Mike Slater, 35. He is president of the Western Union Junction Railroad Club which operates the museum.
It is the railroad history of southeastern Wisconsin which the museum preserves, said Dick Horton, 79, who was one of the founding members of the group in 1991.
“Any history is in danger of dying out right away,” he said. “As soon as you have new technology and new things, the old stuff goes by the wayside.”
“And without keeping these things alive,” he wonders about younger generations, “how are they going to know what railroading was like years ago?”
What it was like is as simple as the knuckle coupler that is now standard on railroad cars. Inside the caboose is an old coupler, a steel loop about an inch thick, 10 inches long, and 3 inches wide. A brakeman would drop a pin through one end of the loop to connect it to one car, and then hold the coupler up with his hand while the next railroad car for the train was backed in.
“And hopefully he would pull his hand out in time. Then they would have dropped the other pin through the coupler pocket,” Slater said. By the 1880s they were out of use. “The knuckle coupler was developed because a lot of the railroad personnel were losing hands or fingers.”
Among the artifacts inside the caboose are old lanterns and the control station from a diesel locomotive. That was donated by a Kenosha man who bought it from a Milwaukee scrapyard and moved it to his basement before he gave it to the museum, Slater said.
Outside, the three boxcars will also become a functioning part of the display. The sound of a circular saw recently echoed out of the middle car as a volunteer remodeled the interior so that by next year it can be added to the public display space.
Although most of the club members are retired, on the other end of the spectrum is Daniel DiFiore who is 13.
He had been posting messages in an online forum and was invited to join because of that, Slater said.
“As soon as I moved here I really got into (the hobby),” DiFiore said. Model trains he tried but didn’t find interesting.
“The big part for me would be photography of trains.”
There’s that plus getting outside on a nice day and spending a couple of hours watching trains. With club meetings and watching trains, he estimated that he devotes about 10 to 12 hours a week to his hobby.
Soon, the museum’s holdings will grow again. One of the club members, Slater said, has purchased an old locomotive. It is sitting in Indiana while arrangements are made to haul it to Sturtevant. Of course the club will have to lay more track first, he said.