California State Railroad Museum
California history at work: history, technology, and old haunts: Part One
Buried in my files are photos from the days before digital, documenting my history with this amazing institution. I’ll have to find them, those prints, ideas and sketches for sculpture projects and for this mural, installed in 1999 for Rail Fair. In searching for history of Rail Fair, I found this video about the 1991 event. It’s an hour long, so do skip around as you like, but the reenactments are fun. You’ll see Cathy Taylor, Executive Director of the Museum, who became my very dearest, instantaneous friend when we met, planning on a trip over the Sierra in the engine. We never got around to that trip but we sure had a blast.
By 2016, the mural, automotive paint on vinyl had faded drastically. We had reproduced the original painting as digital mural, automotive paint on vinyl, so that when it inevitably faded, it could easily be replaced.
Maybe it’s more exciting to install a mural than it is to maintain it, so my pleas were ignored until a 2017 mural festival, Wide Open Walls. So I jumped up on a lift and repainted it by hand. I’m watching for fading again, as the climate becomes impossibly hot in the past eight years. I finally succumbed to the spray can products that have developed over the years to meet the demands of what has become big business, the mural industry in the form of festivals all over the world.
Recently, I contacted a friend to help reconnect me to the Museum. I wanted to visit the shops where, if you had the patience to watch the above video, many of those engines were built or are still maintained. My last visit had been in 2012. When Cathy Taylor had been alive, she’d devoted years to the concept of transforming the portions of the Railyards into some kind of a technology center.
Now, that idea is gathering speed, so to speak, with the Museum & Lemelson-MIT’s "Rail Innovation in Action" program. And… more about the student grant program here. Ty Smith is the Executive Director of the Museum now. On this podcast, he starts with his attraction to history. For me, a generation older, history had been the memorization of dates. From boredom to epiphany, what I finally discovered at UCLA, history is the study of cause and effect. As a scholar, Ty describes himself as a public historian and preservationist; he mentions the “centrality of railroads,” how railroads have informed our language and culture.
Ty spent time at Hearst Castle as well. I share an interest in Wm. Randolf Hearst, especially with London’s trip to Korea as a war correspondent for Hearst in 1904. With Cathy Taylor, I had the privilege of visiting Hearst Castle for a private tour, February 2013.
But I digress from my point: reconnecting to the shops to take new pictures. Thus, a selection, and I need to go back. It had rained so puddles on the floor under a disintegrating roof were a special treat.
Video of the history tour of the shops as I was running around shooting. California State Railroad Museum website.
Railroad and Sacramento History Musum Part Two: coming soon.