Brunswick Railroad Museum celebrates reopening with Train Fest
by Connor Adams Sheets
The Brunswick Railroad Museum reopened last weekend after months of renovations with Train Fest, attracting railroad enthusiasts and visitors by the hundreds.
The museum, which features a massive HO-scale model railroad setup as well as exhibits on Brunswick's rich rail history, has been closed since the end of February for the installation of an elevator and associated work.
Though the construction is not complete — the shaft is built, the elevator itself remains to be installed — and an addition to the model railroad continues, Train Fest was a success, according to museum manager Geri Reynolds.
"We've had a couple hundred people come out. People are glad we're open and they like the changes. At some point we hope to set up Plexiglas so people can watch the progress of the work on the [model railroad] addition," she said. "… We work with kids, showing them different things, and now we're also selling more train hobbyist items and we have more things here for kids, and for First Fridays and other events."
Linda Ballard traveled from Martinsburg, W.Va., with her train-loving 9-year-old grandson on Sunday. First they visited the city's MARC train station, so he could see full-size tracks, then the pair headed to the museum for Train Fest.
"I wanted to bring my grandson so he could further his interest in liking trains," Ballard said. "It's really good that he gets this close-up exposure to what they're really like."
Just tall enough to have a good view of the locomotives, buildings, tracks and mountains laid out in the setup, her grandson said he was having a great time. What did he enjoy the best?
"The sounds of the trains, and making the trains move," he said, enthralled by the sights and sounds of the display, which currently recreates in scale the rail route from Brunswick to Union Station in Washington, D.C., as it would have appeared in the late 1960s.
The new addition, which is slated to be finished by the end of the year, will extend the model tracks past Brunswick, through recreations of Knoxville and Sandy Hook, and terminate in a Harper's Ferry, W.Va., display.
Dave George, a volunteer at the museum and member of its board of directors, works to take care of the trains in the layout. He was at work Sunday, but took the time to explain why he has dedicated hundreds of hours since becoming a volunteer in 2001 to helping the museum.
"Model railroads have a fascination and a charm, and people like them. It's kind of a childhood type of thing; almost everyone had a train set as a kid at Christmas," he said.
"Second, we help people get a sense of the area, and a sense of the history. We're modeling something that doesn't exist anymore, and we hope they enjoy it for being a model railroad, but we also hope they get a sense of place and time out of it."
E-mail Connor Adams Sheets at csheets@gazette.net.
For information about the Brunswick Railroad Museum, to make a donation or to inquire about volunteer opportunities, call 301-834-7100 or visit www.brrm.net.
by Connor Adams Sheets | Staff Writer at http://www.gazette.net
Museum Exibits
It is housed in a 100-year-old, 3-story brick building, with the second floor composed of historic exhibits, and the whole third floor an HO scale model railroad layout depicting the B&O Railroad's Metropolitan line (the MET) from Washington, DC to Brunswick, Maryland, in the late 1950s, as well as showing the Brunswick classification yards, which at one time were about 8 miles (13 km) long.
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