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Seawater Destroys Railroad Museum

Stephen sent in this information about how members of the Galveston Railroad Museum are coping with the disaster that destroyed almost everything.

Here is Stephen’s story and pictures:

The HO and O layouts at the Galveston Railroad Museum were completely destroyed by the seawaters during Hurricane IKE. I was the volunteer curator of the HO layout for the past three years (and about 5 cases of salvaged buildings sit on my front porch).

These are photos of the buildings sitting in their cases on the porch.

The Galveston Rail Road Museum occupies the station site of the old Gulf Colorado and Santa Fe Railway (subdivision of the AT&SF). Begun almost thirty years ago, the Museum added a new Digitrax HO layout about ten years ago and an O scale layout about 5 years ago.

The HO layout was very beautiful with much work done by local model railroad clubs as well as by the company which installed the layout.

I had the great pleasure to serve as curator and to clean the tracks and change out the trains on our four loops which ran all day while the museum was open. Some very nice people from NASA have taken a lot of our documents north to place them in a freeze dry chamber and we are hopeful that much of that material is recoverable.

The two layouts were completely under the seawater and the foam construction of the HO layout shattered under the force of the water. I was able to salvage a number of our original buildings which now sit on my porch awaiting their third and fourth water baths to wash off the silt from Galveston Bay. It is more difficult to remove than I had anticipated, things which remove it easily also remove paint and decals from the buildings so we are going slowly with that.

Much of our HO rolling stock and I believe all of our O scale rolling stock spent time under the seawater and is ruined (seawater is extremely corrosive). The Board of Directors is meeting this week to discuss rebuilding. It will take time as we are currently in the clean up phase. What had once been an REA building which housed our ho and O layouts is now a see through building with all the interior work removed to abate the water and mold.

There is a large blank space where the layouts had once been our most favored exhibits.All of our actual diesel engines were destroyed as the water level reached that of the cab floors. Traction engines do not survive the intrusion of seawater into their brushes.

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