Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Bluefield, WV

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July 29, 2009

Railroad museum to acquire caboose

By GREG JORDAN

PRINCETON — A red caboose now stationed near the Princeton Municipal Building is on track for a new coat of paint and a new home.

The City of Princeton started advertising Wednesday in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph for a contractor to move the caboose from its present location to its new site at the Princeton Railroad Museum.

A federal Transportation Enhancement Grant of $78,280 is helping pay for the transport and for the caboose’s restoration, said Connie Shumate of the Princeton Railroad Museum. The city’s matching grant will help fund the rest of the $99,100 project.

Having the former Virginian Railroad caboose at the museum will be an asset, Shumate said. Visitors always ask if the museum has anything like it in the collection of railroad memorabilia.

“One of the first things they ask when they come to the museum is ‘What cars do you have?’” Shumate said. “They want to see the train cars themselves.”

And cabooses are a unit that are no longer seen on trains today, and children are often fascinated by them, Shumate said. One woman working nearby on her computer suddenly remembered when she learned about cabooses — in kindergarten.

Children would line up in a train and go around the classroom as they sang a song, said 19-year-old Rachel Carson of Athens.

“Little Red Caboose, Little Red Caboose, Little Red Caboose Behind the Train, Train, Train,” she recalled. And every child wanted to be the caboose.

The railroad museum’s caboose will have an interior to exterior renovation, Shumate said. It’s also not the museum’s only new acquisition. A grant recently allowed the museum to purchase a collection of Virginian Railroad memorabilia.

“We have some one-of-a-kind items,” Shumate said. For instance, a collection of railroad keys has a surprising member, a key that unscrews to reveal a corkscrew.

“You unscrew it, and it’s a corkscrew used in dining cars,” she said.

— Contact Greg Jordan at gjordan@bdtonline.com

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