The mission of the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) in Sacramento, CA, is to collect, preserve, and share the deep history of railroads and railroading in California and the rest of the western United States. The organization is also home to a large 19th-century reconstruction of a railroad station and railroad depot, with a still-functional train that gives tours to patrons.
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Page from H. A. Kanzler Travel Journal, 1915, scrapbookCourtesy of California State Railroad Museum Library and Archives |
The mission of the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) in Sacramento, CA, is to collect, preserve, and share the deep history of railroads and railroading in California and the rest of the western United States. The organization is also home to a large 19th-century reconstruction of a railroad station and railroad depot, with a still-functional train that gives tours to patrons.
The origins of the museum and its Library & Archive collections grew out of the Pacific Coast Chapter of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society (RLHS), formed in 1929. In California State Railroad Museum: Railroading in California and the West, Richard Steinheimer wrote of Gilbert H. Kneiss—who would go on to serve as assistant to the president for public relations for the Western Pacific Railroad—and his fellow train enthusiasts, who were concerned that the golden age of railroads was ending, given the popularity of the automobile and the economic deprivations of the Great Depression. They wanted to establish their own local RLHS chapter, but did not have enough people to fulfill the required minimum membership, so they decided to find like-minded enthusiasts by chartering a Southern Pacific train to visit the Sierra Nevada Foothills. The project proved a success, and 162 railroad enthusiasts came out for the trip.
Kneiss and his colleagues gathered enough people to establish the RLHS Pacific Coast Chapter in 1937. They began identifying and acquiring locomotives and railway cars, including the Virginia & Truckee No. 21 J.W. Bowker, built in 1875, with plans to preserve and restore the rolling stock. By the 1960s, the Pacific Coast Chapter wanted permanent home for the trains and other equipment. Sacramento was chosen for the site, since it was home of the Pony Express terminal and the origins of both the Central Pacific and Sacramento Valley railroads.
The Pacific Chapter lobbied then–Gov. Ronald Reagan to support the construction of the museum in 1972. Dr. Denny Anspach, one of the museum’s “founding fathers,” wined and dined him in The Gold Coast, a luxurious private railroad car in the Chapter’s collection. Reagan signed the agreement to establish CSRM and even shoveled the first dirt when construction started.
The museum took shape gradually over the course of 10 years. The first phase saw the opening of the Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station, a reconstruction of the final (or first) stop on the transcontinental railroad. The second and third phases involved opening the Big Four Buildings, which recreated historical stores related to the railroad一the Huntington, Hopkins, & Company hardware store; the Stanford Brothers store; the Dingley Spice Mill building Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station; and the Central Pacific Railroad Freight Depot一along with the museum and its archives and library, in 1981. (Additional phases resulted in the opening of the Excursion Railroad Program, which gives visitors a scenic six-mile train ride, in 1984, and the Central Pacific Railroad Freight Depot and Steam Navigation Terminal in 1986. The sixth and final stage, the proposed Museum of Railroad Technology, was never completed.)
This history collected there is critical, CSRM Librarian Christopher Rockwell told LJ, because “our lives are made of railroad stories. Everyone’s life is affected by the railroad, whether they know it or not.” Railroads were one of the biggest employers in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; if someone was not personally employed by the railroad, they likely knew someone who was or had traveled by rail themselves.
The collection, which dates from the 1860s to the present, includes railroad-related photographs, timetables, engine and station schematics, railroad rule books, and even equipment. The bulk of the collection is from the 1940s and 1950s, when the RLHS first recognized the need to collect materials. Originally, the library and archives took all materials that were donated, but it has become more selective in recent decades. The collections focus primarily on California and the United States west of the Mississippi. Few items relate to southern and eastern railroads, unless these are connected to the west or part of larger collections. While the collections largely comprise late 19th- and 20th-century items, they also hold timetables and other information from railroad companies today.
The archive spans a total of 24,336 linear feet, including 900 manuscript collections. These vary from a single folder to several hundred containers, plus extensive records of several railroad companies—“the daily activities of the railroad created a lot of paper,” said Rockwell.
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Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg in their car The Gold Coast, 1948, photograph, CSRM Negative CollectionCourtesy of California State Railroad Museum Library & Archives |
There are also over three million photographs, including prints, negatives, slides, and scrapbooks. A popular part of the photograph collection is the work of California photographers and partners Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, who traveled in The Gold Coast, their own private railroad car, photographing and writing about railroads.
Beebe and Clegg, Rockwell noted, “were iconic in vitalizing rail fan books”—publications for railroad enthusiasts, varying from coffee table books to more technical guides. Their photographs include images of railroad employees, from track workers to conductors, and railroad cars and stations. The library and archives digitized their records through the California State Library's Digital Concierge Program, a state program “dedicated to preserving and sharing the collections hidden throughout California state government,” according to the website. That project will be available soon on the CSRM website, but some photos are available now, as is a digital exhibit about their life and work.
Also notable are the early Central Pacific and Southern Pacific technical drawings made in Sacramento shops. These 1860s drawings are ornate and illustrated with many original details. What Rockwell finds remarkable, he said, is that engineers and builders were starting fresh; there was no existing railroad industry in the western United States, so they used the supplies they had to build everything themselves. Researchers today find inspiration in the technical drawings of equipment and maps of stations with overhead layout views.
In addition to the drawings, the larger collections for companies like the Southern Pacific contain expenditures for building tracks, engineering records, maintenance reports, payroll records, and public relations correspondence. “Our users vary greatly,” Rockwell noted. “We get people who are academics, we have modelers, we have genealogists.”
He is most excited about the personal stories held within the collection. For example, one of his first acquisitions was the H.A. Kanzler Travel Journal, which documents passenger Kanzler’s railroad trip from Kansas City to California in 1915. In the journal, he wrote about his travels and pasted postcards collected along the way, including his visits to the San Diego Panama Exhibition and Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. “It’s quite visually stunning,” said Rockwell. “It’s fascinating because you get a glimpse into early railroad travel.”
One of the most recent acquisitions was an unexpected one. The family of Jesus Ramirez Garcia had come to the library to donate their collection of railroad operations rule books, but CSRM has many already. When he spoke to family members, however, Rockwell learned that Garcia, their father, had been a foreman for the Maintenance of Way team for Sacramento Northern and other railroad companies. Maintenance of Way was responsible for the upkeep of tracks and other parts of the railroads. They had lived in boxcar housing, which families of railroad members often did. As a result of this chance meeting, the library and archives acquired digital scans of photos of the Garcias as children living in the yards, as well as other photographs, their father’s track work assignments, and payroll documents.
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Passenger aide Elisabeth Batchelder standing next to passenger car, 1940s, photograph, Smith (Elisabeth Batchelder) PapersCourtesy of California State Railroad Museum Library & Archives |
The CSRM archives also holds photographs, biographies, and autobiographies, like that of Elisabeth Batchelder Smith, who worked as a passenger aide on the railroad in the mid-20th century. Before World War II, women served as nurse stewardesses on trains, ministering to passengers who got ill or injured on trips. When the war broke out, many of these nurses went overseas, leaving a gap behind. While civilian travel declined during the war, there was still a need for women to serve in those roles to care for military personnel, even if they were not trained nurses.
One of the items in the Batchelder Smith papers includes a memory aid created by her daughter, Louise, to help her mother remember her own life story. “Elisabeth was alive at the time, and reviewed, redacted, and added extra information to the document in her own writing,” said Rockwell. “The memory prompt includes extra information not found in Elisabeth’s autobiographies, including her encounters with war brides and the transportation of German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war. She also mentions witnessing wounded Army Nurses from the war, and how one of them suffered ‘shell shock’ after luggage fell and crashed onto the railroad tracks.” But once the war was over, the need for those positions disappeared and Smith had to find work elsewhere.
While the archives contain rich materials on California and the west, Rockwell acknowledged that there are areas of omission. “A lot of what we’ve had in the past were your high-up corporate guys,” he said. “We [didn't] get [many materials from] the common individual, the everyday worker.” CSRM staff are currently reassessing and auditing collections to learn more about the personal stories behind some of the artifacts, including uniforms and other textiles.
Writers who have used the CSRM archives and library include Miriam Thaggert, associate professor of English at the University of Buffalo, for Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad, which used the papers and photos of Dr. Theodore Kornweibel Jr. Kornweibel had created a collection of materials on African Americans and the railroad for his own 2010 work, Railroads in the African American Experience: A Photographic Journey ; the archives has his papers and research files from work on the book.
In 2019, Gordon Chang, professor of the humanities at Stanford University, published Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad , exploring the impact and influence of Chinese immigrants on the railroad. He used the Chinese payroll records from the Central Pacific Railroad Collection in the CSRM archives.
Several books have been published about the railroad photographers, including the 2018 Beebe and Clegg: Their Enduring Photographic Legacy by John Gruber, founder of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art; and, in 2019, The Railroad Photography of Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg by Tony Reevy, then senior associate director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rockwell also noted that paraprofessionals in the environmental legal community use the archives to do research for land disputes, comparing train track documents to what physically exists.
CSRM’s educational Laboratory of Learning programs feature school field trips and paid internships for college students, usually from California State University at Sacramento and fellowship programs that vary in scope each year. Rockwell noted that the museum is focusing on revitalizing its Oral History Program, which was originally conducted in 1996. Staff are identifying individuals to interview—including the Garcia family. Students research the museum and archives collection to create online exhibitions on a variety of topics, from how railroads transformed the circus to their role in nuclear missile transport and disarmament.
One student assistant was hired for a digital project focusing on U.S. internment camps of Japanese Americans during World War II, and found some unexpected sources in the Rich Tower Collection: train sheets. These are “very long pieces of paper,” said Rockwell. “They’re a daily journal of railroad activity that’s happening in a division. One sheet will tell you all the trains that have come and gone through that particular day.” In the 1940s, especially between May and October 1942, the archives identified activities related to Japanese internment, documenting when trains left California cities for the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah and other camps. “Our own records related to the railroad just further document the atrocities that were happening,” Rockwell said.
Currently the archives are digitizing material in collaboration with California Revealed, a statewide initiative funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to help archives, museums, and historical societies to digitize and provide online access to their collections. Material will be hosted by the Internet Archive.
Those interested in exploring the archives and library should make an appointment Monday through Friday either by calling (916) 323-8073 or emailing Library.CSRM@parks.ca.gov to schedule a visit. Some materials may be offsite, so one to two weeks advance notice may be needed.
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