The Greeley Freight Station Museum’s Prototype Boxcar

One of the Greeley Freight Station Museum’s best volunteers, Dave Cimbura began some research on finding a prototype boxcar for the museum. The museum happens to be surrounded by railroads, so there are many stored boxcars near them. They decided to do some research to find one that is suitable, and see if they could get a donation. They found one that had been in a small accident and the owner was kind enough to donate it.

Despite the fact that the boxcar had no brakes whatsoever, they pulled it about 15 miles to where it is currently parked. Most modelers have a prototype and then model from that prototype. The museum had the exact opposite challenge, they had a model, but didn’t have a prototype.

The boxcar is compartmentalized into the three departments, on the left they store artifacts, in the middle they have parties, and on the right is the storage area. They have had fun in the boxcar with their many great volunteers. Like any model railroad, they have layers of volunteers. There is a core group of about 20 to 24 who spent a lot of time on the model, doing 80% of the work.

About two months before this video was filmed, the museum hit the 160 mark for volunteers, passing 30,000 volunteer hours. The two main purposes of the museum are showing the public what can be done in the model railroading hobby, and to help, economically, the recovery of the downtown Greeley, Colorado area.

Watch more from Allen Keller’s Great Model Railroad series.