Tour of the Visitor Center

So far we've shown what the street-side facade of the Visitor Center will look like.  But even more important is what will be inside the building.  Want to take a tour?  We know you do!  So here's an explanation of the various features that have been cleverly designed into the structure.  This is looking at the building with the roof removed, in the south-east direction.  The building directly across the street, in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, is the Schroeder Store.

1 - Main public entrance from parking lot, at the northwest corner of the building near a circle drive for drop-off; the canopy roof provides shelter for school groups to queue or for people to wait out of the rain.
2 - Ticket window, intended to use original ticket counter wickets from Union Station
3 - This wide "hallway" along the side of the building will funnel arriving visitors toward Main Street and will provide space for exhibits along the walls
4 - Restroom entrances are here; the big grey block pictured has restrooms on the lower level and storage space on the upper level, with second-floor bay windows to present an "interlocking tower" look
5 - Past the restroom entrances, arriving visitors are directed left and down this hallway to the main hall, with more space here for exhibits and orientation signage along the walls
6 - In the main hall, there is space for a small theater area where an orientation video can be shown, as well as ample space for historic exhibits
7 - This is where the main entrance/exit from the Visitor Center out onto Main Street is located; from the outside, it will simulate a theater entrance complete with overhead marquee
8 - The center of the main hall will feature a track where a couple of pieces of rolling stock can be displayed; the horsecar is pictured (in yellow) as an example
9 - Along the east side of the main hall are air walls that allow up to three classrooms or flexible event rooms to be blocked off, with various configurations possible
10 - This is the southernmost of the three classrooms, shown with chairs set up lecture-style; these rooms can also be left open to the rest of the Main Hall by retracting the air walls completely
11 - Along the east side of the building is the office wing; at the southeast corner, indicated here, is a small reception room for volunteers that will include the operations sign-in station
12 - This office space will replace the current museum office
13 - The center of the three flexible classroom spaces is shown here with round tables set up and the air wall to the Main Hall retracted
14 - The northernmost of the three classroom spaces is pictured with rectangular tables
15 - In the center of the north wall of the building, facing the parking lot, is a track door to permit equipment to be moved in and out of the Main Hall display track (item 8); this would be intended only for extremely rare use, as the equipment on display would be placed there semi-permanently
16 - Exit through the gift shop! Visitors leaving the museum would walk back into the Visitor Center through the theater door off Main Street (item 7) and be directed through the gift shop to the entrance. The gift shop has doors at both its east and west ends to allow this. The staff working the ticket counter (item 2) could also work the gift shop on light days simply by turning 180 degrees.

Help Build the Visitor Center

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.