The biggest capital improvement project IRM has ever undertaken is now underway, and if you don't receive Rail &Wire in the mail (and why not???) let us tell you about it.
The planned Visitor Center will be a large building, similar in many ways to the Multi-Purpose Building (MPB), and will be located on the north side of Central Avenue across from the MPB. Visitors will enter the property through an entrance on the north side of the building, buy tickets and so forth, and exit onto Main Street through the south side of the building, pictured above. These false fronts will provide a greatly enhanced section of the Museum's growing Main Street scene.
Currently, of course, IRM does not have a permanent facility for visitor entrance functions, and we use the Marengo Depot and the Schroeder Store for some of them. But we can do better.
For comparison, let's see what some of the competition (so to speak) have done in terms of building new visitor centers. There's nothing in this immediate area that really compares -- East Troy uses their substation, which is limited in size, and North Freedom has a wooden depot comparable in size and utilization to our Marengo depot. Those are both historic buildings.
One of the more impressive newly built structures is the one at Rio Vista (Western Railway Museum), which includes the ticket office, various visitor-oriented displays, a cafe, the gift shop, and the extensive library holdings.
Seashore Trolley Museum has a nice visitor center designed in the style of a large frame depot. It includes the ticket office, displays, an event area, and the gift shop.
IRM's planned visitor center would be about twice the size of Seashore's and roughly comparable in square footage to WRM's, but with much more of its area devoted to flexible space that could be used for classrooms, lectures, banquets, temporary exhibits, etc.
More information and ways to donate can be found here.
3 comments:
Randall,
The Visitor Center at the Western Railway Museum has paid for itself in many ways. It gave us a set of modern bathrooms, a larger book store and of course a place for the F.M Smith Library and the Harry C. Atkin Archives. I worked there for almost 30 years. But most of all, where is the museum questions have been answered. You might add to your list the huge new Visitor and Education Center at the Pennsylvania Trolly Museum. it will be state of the art for years to come. TM still an IRM Member
Thanks very much for sharing this vision of IRM's future. It looks like our museum will join the ranks of others with fantastic structures replicating the magnificence of railroading in America. We'll be replicating Chicago institutions F.W. Woolworth's and Sears Roebuck and Company which utilized both standardization, fast freight, and LCL systems of the railroads to distribute wonderful productivity of the cities to the rural areas and generally make the world better. Not sure how the large artifacts get inside, though. O. Anderson
We're not done with the Visitor Center yet. There's lots more to say.
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